GeForce GTX 850M vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which comes with a clock speed of 625 MHz and a GDDR4 memory speed of 993 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It features 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (175%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4850 2GB should theoretically be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 850M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 31552 (99%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M should be quite a bit (more or less 40%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10040 (40%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 850M is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4016 (40%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

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