GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 625 MHz. The GDDR4 RAM runs at a speed of 993 MHz on this particular model. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		90 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (22%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4850 2GB will be 10% quicker than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 5952 (10%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB is quite a bit (approximately 25%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		31200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6200 (25%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 400 (4%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.