GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7850, which features a core clock speed of 860 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, 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 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 106 Watts (82%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7850 should theoretically be a little bit better than the GeForce GTX 280 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
	Difference: 11904 (8%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 should be a little bit (approximately 14%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 280. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6880 (14%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is superior to the GeForce GTX 280, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8256 (43%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If 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, 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 texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.