GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7850, which has core clock speeds of 860 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 106 Watts (82%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7850 should be a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 280 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
	Difference: 11904 (8%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be a little bit (approximately 14%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 280. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6880 (14%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is much (about 43%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 280, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8256 (43%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of 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 also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.