GeForce GTX 560 vs Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, which has GPU core speed of 625 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR3 RAM running at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 560		150 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 560 should be a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		128128 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 1024 (1%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB should be a little bit (approximately 10%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 560. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560		45360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4640 (10%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 560 should be a lot (about 30%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		25920 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5920 (30%)

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 max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.