GeForce GTX 1050 3GB vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7850, which features a GPU core clock speed of 860 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1050 3GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (73%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7850 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce GTX 1050 3GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 1050 3GB		86016 MB/sec
	Difference: 67584 (79%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1050 3GB should be much (more or less 21%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1050 3GB		66816 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11776 (21%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1050 3GB should be quite a bit (more or less 21%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7850, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1050 3GB		33408 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5888 (21%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.