GeForce 9800 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 4830 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, which comes with a core clock speed of 575 MHz and a GDDR4 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is made up of 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 1GB		95 Watts
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		105 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (11%)

Memory Bandwidth

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GT 512MB is a lot (approximately 83%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		33600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15200 (83%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB is the winner, but not by far. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		9600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 400 (4%)

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 past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once 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 in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.