GeForce GTX 965M vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which comes with a core clock frequency of 625 MHz and a GDDR4 memory frequency of 993 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 965M		60 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (83%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 965M, in theory, should be a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 965M		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 448 (1%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 965M should be a lot (approximately 142%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 965M		60416 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35416 (142%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 965M is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 965M		30208 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20208 (202%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once 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, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.