GeForce 9800 GTX+ vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all 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 is comprised of 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, 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+		145 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (12%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7850 should perform much 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 should be just a bit (more or less 17%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 9800 GTX+. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7808 (17%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 should be much (about 133%) better at AA than the GeForce 9800 GTX+, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15712 (133%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount 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 amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.