GeForce GTS 450 1GB vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7950, which features core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1536 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450 1GB		106 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 94 Watts (89%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7950 should be 316% quicker than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 182272 (316%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 will be quite a bit (approximately 258%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 64544 (258%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 will be quite a bit (approximately 104%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13072 (104%)

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 moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.