GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which comes with core clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR4 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970M		75 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (47%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 970M is 51% faster than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 32448 (51%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M should be much (about 196%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48920 (196%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970M is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 34352 (344%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed 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 graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.