GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 625 MHz. The GDDR4 memory works at a frequency of 993 MHz on this specific model. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 870M should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 32448 (51%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M will be much (about 322%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 80392 (322%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 870M is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12584 (126%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at 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 that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.