GeForce GTS 450 1GB vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

The GeForce GTS 450 1GB features a GPU core clock speed of 783 MHz, and the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM is set to run at 902 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 192 Stream Processors, 32 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 625 MHz. The GDDR4 RAM works at a speed of 993 MHz on this model. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.