GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6850, which has a clock speed of 775 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 960 SPUs, 48 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (35%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6850 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 8800 Ultra overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 24320 (23%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 Ultra is a small bit (more or less 5%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1968 (5%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is superior to the GeForce 8800 Ultra, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10112 (69%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.