GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7850, which has a clock speed of 860 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1024 SPUs, 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 is 8% quicker than the GeForce GTX 280 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be just a bit (more or less 14%) more effective at texture 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 using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is superior to the GeForce GTX 280, by far. (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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.