GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 625 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR4 memory set to run at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 980 should in theory be much faster than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 160448 (252%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 will be much (approximately 477%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 119128 (477%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 should be much (about 621%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, and should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 62064 (621%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

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