GeForce 9600 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 4830 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, which has a clock frequency of 575 MHz and a GDDR4 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 640(128x5) SPUs, 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 the exact same memory bandwidth, so theoretically they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GT 512MB should be just a bit (about 13%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 1GB. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

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

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		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 moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 fill 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.