GeForce GTX 460 SE vs Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, which features clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		150 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB should theoretically be just a bit superior to the GeForce GTX 460 SE overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 18304 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB should be a lot (more or less 60%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 SE. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18800 (60%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 SE is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		20800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 800 (4%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.