GeForce GTX 850M vs Radeon HD 4850 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 625 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 memory set to run at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (175%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4850 512MB will be 99% faster than the GeForce GTX 850M overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 31552 (99%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M is quite a bit (about 40%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10040 (40%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 850M is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4016 (40%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.