GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon HD 4850 512MB

Intro

The GeForce GTX 960 makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 1127 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this particular model. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, which features a core clock frequency of 625 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 993 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It features 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of 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.