Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 625 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR4 memory set to run at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
Geforce GTX 680		195 Watts
	Difference: 85 Watts (77%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Geforce GTX 680 should in theory be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB in general. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		192256 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 128704 (203%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 will be quite a bit (about 415%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		128768 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 103768 (415%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 680 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		32192 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22192 (222%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.