GeForce GTX 960M vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 625 MHz. The GDDR4 RAM is set to run at a speed of 993 MHz on this particular card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960M		65 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (69%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 960M should in theory be a little bit better than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 448 (1%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960M should be a lot (more or less 75%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18840 (75%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960M is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7536 (75%)

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 max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.