GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which has a clock speed of 625 MHz and a GDDR4 memory frequency of 993 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 870M, in theory, 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 is quite a bit (more or less 322%) better at anisotropic filtering 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

The GeForce GTX 870M should be a lot (more or less 126%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.