GeForce GTX 570 vs Radeon HD 4850 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, which comes with core clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
GeForce GTX 570		219 Watts
	Difference: 109 Watts (99%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 570 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		152000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 88448 (139%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 should be a lot (more or less 76%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		43920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18920 (76%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 should be much (approximately 193%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19280 (193%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

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