GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 625 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR4 RAM running at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450		106 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 4 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4850 1GB should perform a bit faster than the GeForce GTS 450 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 5824 (10%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 should be a bit (more or less 0%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 56 (0%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 will be quite a bit (more or less 25%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.