GeForce 8800 GTX vs Radeon HD 4850 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, which uses 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 card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
GeForce 8800 GTX		155 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (41%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce 8800 GTX should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTX		86400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 22848 (36%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 GTX should be a lot (approximately 47%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTX		36800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11800 (47%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 8800 GTX is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTX		13800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3800 (38%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.