GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7850, which features GPU clock speed of 860 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1024 Stream Processors, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB		143 Watts
	Difference: 13 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7850 will be 142% faster than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB		63360 MB/sec
	Difference: 90240 (142%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be a lot (more or less 124%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB		24624 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 30416 (124%)

Pixel Rate

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

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB		10260 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17260 (168%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.