GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with a clock frequency of 860 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1024 SPUs, 64 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX 970		10867 points
Radeon HD 7850		5200 points
	Difference: 5667 (109%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 970		262 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7850		171 Sol/s
	Difference: 91 (53%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 970		19 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7850		13 Mh/s
	Difference: 6 (46%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (12%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 970 should in theory perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 7850 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 70400 (46%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 should be a lot (approximately 98%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 54160 (98%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970 is superior to the Radeon HD 7850, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 39680 (144%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of 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 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 that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.