GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7850, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 860 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1200 MHz on this particular card. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 64 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		150 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (15%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7850 should theoretically be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 44800 (41%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be quite a bit (approximately 51%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		36400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18640 (51%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is much (approximately 32%) better at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM), and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		20800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6720 (32%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.