GeForce GTX 950 vs Radeon HD 4850 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 625 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM set to run at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950		90 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (22%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 950 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950		105728 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 42176 (66%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 950 will be a lot (approximately 97%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950		49152 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24152 (97%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 950 is much (more or less 228%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, and should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950		32768 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22768 (228%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.