GeForce 8800 GTX vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which features clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR4 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
GeForce 8800 GTX		155 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (41%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce 8800 GTX should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTX		86400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 22848 (36%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 GTX will be quite a bit (more or less 47%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTX		36800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11800 (47%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 8800 GTX is a lot (more or less 38%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, and able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTX		13800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3800 (38%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should 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 AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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 memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.