GeForce GTX 285 1GB vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all that 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 made up of 1024 SPUs, 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 285 1GB		204 Watts
	Difference: 74 Watts (57%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 285 1GB should be 4% faster than the Radeon HD 7850 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 285 1GB		158976 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 5376 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is a little bit (about 6%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 285 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		51840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (6%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		20736 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6784 (33%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core 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 is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.