GeForce 8800 GTX vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7850, which has core speeds of 860 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
GeForce 8800 GTX		155 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (19%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7850 is 78% faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 67200 (78%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be a lot (about 50%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		36800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18240 (50%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		13800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13720 (99%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen 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 clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.