GeForce 8800 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which comes with clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR4 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GT 1GB		105 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4850 1GB should be 10% quicker than the GeForce 8800 GT 1GB in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 5952 (10%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 GT 1GB should be quite a bit (about 34%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GT 1GB		33600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8600 (34%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 1GB is a bit (approximately 4%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 GT 1GB, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 1GB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 400 (4%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock 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 also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.