GeForce GTX 965M vs Radeon HD 4850 512MB

Intro

The GeForce GTX 965M features a clock speed of 944 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 625 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 993 MHz on this specific model. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling 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 could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.