GeForce GTX 850M vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4790, which features GPU clock speed of 600 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 800 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 640(128x5) Stream Processors, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4790 should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 850M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 70400 (220%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M is a lot (more or less 83%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15840 (83%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M should be a lot (approximately 46%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 4790, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4416 (46%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at 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 chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.