GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7850, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 860 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1200 MHz on this particular card. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX 980		13552 points
Radeon HD 7850		5200 points
	Difference: 8352 (161%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 980		20 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7850		13 Mh/s
	Difference: 7 (54%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 980		408 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7850		171 Sol/s
	Difference: 237 (139%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (27%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 980 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7850 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 70400 (46%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 is much (approximately 162%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 89088 (162%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 is much (approximately 162%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 7850, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 44544 (162%)

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

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of 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 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 the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.