GeForce GTX 460 vs Radeon HD 4850 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, which comes with a clock speed of 625 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 993 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is made up of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
GeForce GTX 460		150 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (36%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 460 should in theory perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		86400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 22848 (36%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 is much (about 51%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		37800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (51%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		16200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6200 (62%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

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