GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which has clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR4 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		135 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (23%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 4850 2GB should theoretically be just a bit superior to the GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		62080 MB/sec
	Difference: 1472 (2%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) will be quite a bit (more or less 66%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		41600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16600 (66%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) is a bit (about 4%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, and capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		10400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 400 (4%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.