GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, which comes with a core clock speed of 625 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 993 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		250 Watts
	Difference: 105 Watts (72%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 970 should in theory be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 96896 (76%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 is quite a bit (about 118%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 59200 (118%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970 is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 47200 (236%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.