GeForce GTX 960M vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which has a clock speed of 625 MHz and a GDDR4 memory speed of 993 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It features 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960M		65 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (69%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 960M should be 1% quicker than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 448 (1%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960M is much (more or less 75%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18840 (75%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960M is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7536 (75%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.