GeForce GTX 570 vs Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, which comes with a clock frequency of 625 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 993 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 570		219 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		250 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 570 should in theory be a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		152000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 24896 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB should be a small bit (about 14%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 570. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 570		43920 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6080 (14%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 570 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9280 (46%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.