GeForce GTX 460 1GB vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6870, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1050 MHz on this specific card. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		160 Watts
	Difference: 9 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6870 will be 17% quicker than the GeForce GTX 460 1GB in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 is much (more or less 33%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		37800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12600 (33%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is superior to the GeForce GTX 460 1GB, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (33%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.