GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 4830 512MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, which comes with clock speeds of 575 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 640(128x5) SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same memory bandwidth, so in theory they should perform the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GT 1GB will be a little bit (about 13%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (13%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GT 1GB should be a small bit (approximately 13%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better 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 maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.