GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 625 MHz. The GDDR4 memory works at a frequency of 993 MHz on this model. 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)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 105 Watts (95%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 470 should theoretically be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 70368 (111%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 should be much (about 36%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8992 (36%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 470 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14280 (143%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.