GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7850, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 860 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this particular card. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 106 Watts (82%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7850 should be 8% quicker than the GeForce GTX 280 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
	Difference: 11904 (8%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 should be a small bit (more or less 14%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 280. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6880 (14%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is superior to the GeForce GTX 280, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8256 (43%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could 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 Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.