GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7850, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 860 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1200 MHz on this particular model. 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)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
	Difference: 41 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7850 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 8800 Ultra overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 49920 (48%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is much (about 41%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15872 (41%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be much (more or less 87%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 Ultra, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12832 (87%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.