GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7850, which features core speeds of 860 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 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 9800 GTX		140 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7850 should be quite a bit faster 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 will be a lot (about 27%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 9800 GTX. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is superior to the GeForce 9800 GTX, by a large margin. (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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.