GeForce 9800 GTX+ vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ features a core clock frequency of 738 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 1100 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 128 SPUs, 64 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which features core speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR4 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 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 GTX+ Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 4850 1GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce 9800 GTX+	Radeon HD 4850 1GB
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	July 2008	Jun 25, 2008
Code Name	G92b	RV770 PRO
Fab Process	55 nm	55 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe 2.0 x16
Memory	512 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	738 MHz	625 MHz
Shader Speed	1836 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1100 MHz	993 MHz
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
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 3.0
Power (Max TDP)	145 watts	110 watts
Shader Model	4.0	4.1
Bandwidth	70400 MB/sec	63552 MB/sec
Texel Rate	47232 Mtexels/sec	25000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	11808 Mpixels/sec	10000 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.