GeForce GTX 275 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 275		219 Watts
	Difference: 68 Watts (45%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6870 will be 6% quicker than the GeForce GTX 275 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 275		127008 MB/sec
	Difference: 7392 (6%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 275 is just a bit (approximately 0%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 275		50640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 240 (0%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		17724 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11076 (62%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out 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 many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.