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GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

The GeForce 9800 GTX has core clock speeds of 675 MHz on the GPU, and 1100 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 128 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which comes with a clock speed of 625 MHz and a GDDR4 memory frequency 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 Raster Operation Units.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX		140 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (27%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 9800 GTX, in theory, should be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB in general. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 6848 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX is a lot (about 73%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18200 (73%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GTX is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		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

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GeForce 9800 GTX

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Radeon HD 4850 2GB

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model	GeForce 9800 GTX	Radeon HD 4850 2GB
Manufacturer	nVidia	AMD
Year	April 2008	Jun 25, 2008
Code Name	G92	RV770 PRO
Memory	512 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	675 MHz	625 MHz
Memory Speed	2200 MHz	1986 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	140 watts	110 watts
Bandwidth	70400 MB/sec	63552 MB/sec
Texel Rate	43200 Mtexels/sec	25000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	10800 Mpixels/sec	10000 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	128	800(160x5)
Texture Mapping Units	64	40
Render Output Units	16	16
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR4
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
Fab Process	65 nm	55 nm
Transistors	754 million	956 million
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe 2.0 x16
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 3.0

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across 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 type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card 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 colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.

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