GeForce GT 340 1GB vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which has core clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR4 memory. 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

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 340 1GB		69 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 41 Watts (59%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4850 2GB will be 17% quicker than the GeForce GT 340 1GB overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
GeForce GT 340 1GB		54400 MB/sec
	Difference: 9152 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 2GB will be much (more or less 42%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 340 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 340 1GB		17600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7400 (42%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4850 2GB is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 340 1GB		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (127%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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