GeForce 8800 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which has core clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR4 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GT 1GB		105 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 4850 2GB should perform a small bit faster than the GeForce 8800 GT 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 5952 (10%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 GT 1GB is much (more or less 34%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GT 1GB		33600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8600 (34%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 2GB will be a bit (more or less 4%) more effective at AA than the GeForce 8800 GT 1GB, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 1GB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 400 (4%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.