GeForce GTX 275 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with clock speeds of 860 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
GeForce GTX 275		219 Watts
	Difference: 89 Watts (68%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7850 is 21% quicker than the GeForce GTX 275 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 275		127008 MB/sec
	Difference: 26592 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be a bit (more or less 9%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 275. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		50640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4400 (9%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be much (approximately 55%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 275, and also able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		17724 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9796 (55%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount 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 rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.