GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon HD 4850 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, which features GPU clock speed of 625 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 memory running at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 512MB		110 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX		140 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (27%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 9800 GTX, in theory, should perform just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 6848 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX is much (more or less 73%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18200 (73%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX should be a bit (more or less 8%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 512MB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 800 (8%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units 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 fill 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.