GeForce GTX 660 Ti vs Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB, which comes with core speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		150 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 660 Ti should be 13% faster than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		144000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 16896 (13%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti will be quite a bit (about 105%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		50000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52480 (105%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 660 Ti is a better choice, though not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		21960 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1960 (10%)

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 max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 graphics card can possibly record 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 sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.