GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon HD 4850 512MB

Intro

Compare all that 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 runs at a frequency of 993 MHz on this particular model. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 860M		45 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (144%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 860M should theoretically be a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 448 (1%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M is a lot (approximately 206%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 51512 (206%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M will be a lot (about 28%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2752 (28%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.