GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which has clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR4 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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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

Performance-wise, the GeForce 9800 GTX should in theory be a small bit superior to 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 much (about 73%) better at AF 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 running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GTX is the winner, though only just barely. (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

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.