GeForce 9600 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 4830 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 575 MHz. The GDDR3 memory works at a speed of 900 MHz on this model. It features 640(128x5) SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same memory bandwidth, so theoretically they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GT 512MB should be a little bit (about 13%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		20800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (13%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB is a better choice, but only just. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1200 (13%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.