GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon HD 4730

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4730, which comes with GPU clock speed of 700 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 900 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 TAUs, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce 9800 GTX should in theory be much better than the Radeon HD 4730 in general. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (22%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX should be much (approximately 93%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20800 (93%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GTX is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5200 (93%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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 higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.