GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6870, which features core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX 960		7627 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 4757 (166%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (26%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6870, in theory, should perform just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 960 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 22400 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 should be a lot (more or less 43%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21728 (43%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 should be a lot (approximately 25%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 6870, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7264 (25%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.