GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, which has GPU clock speed of 625 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR3 RAM set to run at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		250 Watts
	Difference: 79 Watts (46%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 23424 (23%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB should be quite a bit (about 28%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10832 (28%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB should be a lot (about 36%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce 8800 Ultra, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5312 (36%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

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 within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount 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 better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

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