GeForce GTS 450 1GB vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7850, which has a GPU core clock speed of 860 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1024 Stream Processors, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450 1GB		106 Watts
Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
	Difference: 24 Watts (23%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7850 will be 166% quicker than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 95872 (166%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 should be much (approximately 120%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29984 (120%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14992 (120%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.