GeForce 9800 GTX+ vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7850, which features a clock frequency of 860 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 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

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7850 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 9800 GTX+ in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 should be a small bit (more or less 17%) faster with regards to 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

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is superior to the GeForce 9800 GTX+, and very much so. (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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to 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 ability to get to the maximum fill rate.