GeForce 8800 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare all that 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 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 993 MHz on this specific card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		105 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4850 1GB should be 10% quicker than the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 5952 (10%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 GT 512MB should be quite a bit (about 34%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		33600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8600 (34%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4850 1GB is a better choice, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.