GeForce 9800 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7850, which has core clock speeds of 860 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		105 Watts
Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (24%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7850 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce 9800 GT 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (167%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 should be a lot (more or less 64%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GT 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21440 (64%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17920 (187%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high 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 number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.