GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 4830 512MB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 575 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 900 MHz on this particular model. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 512MB		95 Watts
GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (47%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 660 should in theory be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 86592 (150%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 should be much (approximately 326%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 60000 (326%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 660 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14320 (156%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.