GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 625 MHz. The GDDR4 memory works at a speed of 993 MHz on this card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450		106 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 4 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4850 2GB should theoretically be a bit faster than the GeForce GTS 450 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 5824 (10%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 is a bit (about 0%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 56 (0%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTS 450 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2528 (25%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must 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, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.