GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all of 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 Stream Processors, 64 TAUs, 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 260 Core 216		202 Watts
	Difference: 72 Watts (55%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7850 should theoretically be much superior to the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 41712 (37%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 should be a lot (approximately 33%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		41472 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13568 (33%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen 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 260 Core 216		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11392 (71%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.