GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB vs Radeon HD 4850 512MB

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB		143 Watts
	Difference: 33 Watts (30%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4850 512MB will be 0% faster than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB		63360 MB/sec
	Difference: 192 (0%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 512MB is a little bit (more or less 2%) better at AF than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB		24624 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 376 (2%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB		10260 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 260 (3%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.