GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 625 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR3 memory running at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		250 Watts
	Difference: 79 Watts (46%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB should perform much faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 23424 (23%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB should be much (approximately 28%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10832 (28%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB should be much (about 36%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce 8800 Ultra, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5312 (36%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.