GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7850, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 860 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1200 MHz on this particular card. 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 260 216SP 55 nm		171 Watts
	Difference: 41 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7850 should in theory be much faster than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 41712 (37%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be quite a bit (approximately 33%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		41472 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13568 (33%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is superior to the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.