Geforce GTX 690 vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which comes with a clock speed of 625 MHz and a GDDR4 memory speed of 993 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is made up of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
Geforce GTX 690		300 Watts
	Difference: 190 Watts (173%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Geforce GTX 690 should be 505% faster than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		384512 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 320960 (505%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 should be quite a bit (approximately 837%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		234240 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 209240 (837%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 is quite a bit (more or less 486%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, and able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		58560 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 48560 (486%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.