GeForce 8500 GT vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7790, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this model. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8500 GT		45 Watts
Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (89%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7790 should be much faster than the GeForce 8500 GT in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 83200 (650%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 will be a lot (approximately 1456%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52400 (1456%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7790 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14200 (789%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be 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 higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.