GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 625 MHz. The GDDR4 memory works at a speed of 993 MHz on this card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 860M		45 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (144%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 860M should theoretically be a little bit superior to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 448 (1%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M will be a lot (approximately 206%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 51512 (206%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 860M is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2752 (28%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.