Geforce GTX 670 vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 625 MHz. The GDDR4 RAM works at a speed of 993 MHz on this model. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
Geforce GTX 670		170 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (55%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Geforce GTX 670 should in theory perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB in general. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		192000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 128448 (202%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 670 should be much (approximately 310%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 77480 (310%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 670 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19280 (193%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 maximum amount of pixels that 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 number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.