GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7850, which has a GPU core clock speed of 860 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		135 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7850 should in theory be a lot superior to the GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		62080 MB/sec
	Difference: 91520 (147%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is much (approximately 32%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G92). (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		41600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13440 (32%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is superior to the GeForce 8800 GTS (G92), and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17120 (165%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.