GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7850, which has core speeds of 860 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1024 SPUs along with 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 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 159 Watts (122%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 295 should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon HD 7850 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 70176 (46%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 is a lot (more or less 67%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37120 (67%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 should be just a bit (more or less 17%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 7850, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4736 (17%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.