GeForce GT 1030 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7850, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 860 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this particular model. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 64 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 1030		30 Watts
Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (333%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7850 should be 213% faster than the GeForce GT 1030 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GT 1030		49152 MB/sec
	Difference: 104448 (213%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be quite a bit (approximately 36%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GT 1030. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 1030		40480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14560 (36%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 1030		20240 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7280 (36%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.