GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 4850 512MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, which features a clock speed of 625 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 993 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is made up of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450		106 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
	Difference: 4 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4850 512MB should be a small bit faster than the GeForce GTS 450 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 5824 (10%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 will be a bit (approximately 0%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 56 (0%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTS 450 is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2528 (25%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.