GeForce GTX 960M vs Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 625 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM works at a speed of 993 MHz on this particular card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960M		65 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		250 Watts
	Difference: 185 Watts (285%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB should in theory be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 960M in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		127104 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 63104 (99%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB should be just a bit (more or less 14%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 960M. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		50000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6160 (14%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB will be a little bit (approximately 14%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce GTX 960M, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		20000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2464 (14%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.