GeForce 9800 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

The GeForce 9800 GT 1GB has a GPU core clock speed of 600 MHz, and the 1024 MB of GDDR3 memory is set to run at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 112 Stream Processors, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which features GPU clock speed of 625 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR4 memory set to run at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce 9800 GT 1GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 4850 2GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce 9800 GT 1GB	Radeon HD 4850 2GB
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	July 2008	Jun 25, 2008
Code Name	G92a/b	RV770 PRO
Fab Process	65/55 nm	55 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe 2.0 x16
Memory	1024 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	600 MHz	625 MHz
Shader Speed	1500 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	900 MHz	993 MHz
Unified Shaders	112	800(160x5)
Texture Mapping Units	56	40
Render Output Units	16	16
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR4
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 3.0
Power (Max TDP)	105 watts	110 watts
Shader Model	4.0	4.1
Bandwidth	57600 MB/sec	63552 MB/sec
Texel Rate	33600 Mtexels/sec	25000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	9600 Mpixels/sec	10000 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many 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.