GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7850, which features a clock speed of 860 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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 960		7627 points
Radeon HD 7850		5200 points
	Difference: 2427 (47%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7850		171 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 960		154 Sol/s
	Difference: 17 (11%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7850		13 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 960		11 Mh/s
	Difference: 2 (18%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7850 should be much faster than the GeForce GTX 960 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 41600 (37%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 is quite a bit (about 31%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17088 (31%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8544 (31%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate 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 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 memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.