GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7850, which has a GPU core clock speed of 860 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 7850		5200 points
GeForce GTX 480		3650 points
	Difference: 1550 (42%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 120 Watts (92%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 480 should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 7850 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 23808 (16%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be a lot (about 31%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13040 (31%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 480 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6080 (22%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour 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 also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.