GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with a clock speed of 860 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1024 SPUs, 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 260 Core 216		202 Watts
	Difference: 72 Watts (55%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7850 should be much faster than the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 41712 (37%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is quite a bit (more or less 33%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		41472 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13568 (33%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11392 (71%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. 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 lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.