GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
GeForce GTS 150		141 Watts
	Difference: 11 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7850 should in theory be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTS 150 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (380%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 should be a little bit (about 16%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTS 150. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7680 (16%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15680 (132%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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 memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.