GeForce GTX 560 vs Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, which comes with core clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 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

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 560 should in theory be a bit superior to 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 is a little bit (approximately 10%) faster with regards to 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 is a lot (about 30%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card 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 Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output 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 ability to reach the maximum fill rate.