GeForce GTX 560 vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 625 MHz. The GDDR4 memory is set to run at a frequency of 993 MHz on this particular card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
GeForce GTX 560		150 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (36%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 560 will be 102% quicker than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		128128 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 64576 (102%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 560 should be quite a bit (more or less 81%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		45360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20360 (81%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 560 is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		25920 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15920 (159%)

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 MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 amount 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 clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock 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 is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.