GeForce 9800 GTX+ vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 625 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR4 memory set to run at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX+		145 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ should perform a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		70400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 6848 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ is a lot (approximately 89%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22232 (89%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ should be a small bit (about 18%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		11808 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1808 (18%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel 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 ability to get to the max fill rate.