GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with GPU 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 comprised of 1024 Stream Processors, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 159 Watts (122%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 295 should theoretically be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 7850 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 70176 (46%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 should be much (approximately 67%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37120 (67%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 295 is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4736 (17%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.