GeForce 8800 GTX vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7850, which features core speeds of 860 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 64 TAUs 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

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7850 should perform much faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 should be quite a bit (approximately 50%) better at 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 superior to the GeForce 8800 GTX, by a large margin. (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 max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.