GeForce GTX 1050 3GB vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with core speeds of 860 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1050 3GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (73%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7850 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 1050 3GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 1050 3GB		86016 MB/sec
	Difference: 67584 (79%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1050 3GB will be much (more or less 21%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1050 3GB		66816 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11776 (21%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 1050 3GB is superior to the Radeon HD 7850, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1050 3GB		33408 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5888 (21%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few 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.