GeForce GTX 460 2GB vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which has GPU clock speed of 625 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR4 RAM set to run at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		160 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (45%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 460 2GB will be 81% faster than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 2GB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 51648 (81%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 2GB should be much (approximately 51%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 2GB		37800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (51%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 2GB is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 2GB		21600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11600 (116%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.