GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with GPU clock speed of 860 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1024 Stream Processors, 64 TAUs, 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 9800 GTX		140 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7850 should theoretically be much better than the GeForce 9800 GTX overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 83200 (118%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is a lot (more or less 27%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11840 (27%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 should be a lot (approximately 155%) better at AA than the GeForce 9800 GTX, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16720 (155%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's 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 can be processed in one 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 better this number, the better the video card will be at handling 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 video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core 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 rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.