GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, which comes with core clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		250 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 980M should theoretically be just a bit superior to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 896 (1%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M will be quite a bit (more or less 99%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 49648 (99%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980M is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 46432 (232%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.