GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which has a GPU core clock speed of 625 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR4 memory set to run at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		135 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (23%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4850 2GB should be a little bit faster than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		62080 MB/sec
	Difference: 1472 (2%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) is much (approximately 66%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		41600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16600 (66%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		10400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.