GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 4850 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, which comes with core speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 34944 (55%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti will be a small bit (more or less 15%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3800 (15%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core 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 many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.