GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 625 MHz. The GDDR4 memory is set to run at a speed of 993 MHz on this card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 105 Watts (95%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 470 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 70368 (111%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 should be much (more or less 36%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8992 (36%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 will be a lot (about 143%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14280 (143%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range 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 figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.