GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which comes with core clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR4 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 980M should in theory be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 64448 (101%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M should be a lot (more or less 299%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 74648 (299%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980M is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 56432 (564%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling 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 the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.