GeForce GTX 285 1GB vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7850, which has a core clock speed of 860 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

In theory, the GeForce GTX 285 1GB should be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7850 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 should be a little bit (more or less 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

The Radeon HD 7850 is much (approximately 33%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 285 1GB, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.