GeForce GTX 965M vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which features a core clock frequency of 625 MHz and a GDDR4 memory speed of 993 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is made up of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 965M		60 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (83%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 965M should in theory be a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 965M		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 448 (1%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 965M should be a lot (approximately 142%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 965M		60416 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35416 (142%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 965M is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 965M		30208 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20208 (202%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.