GeForce 9800 GTX+ vs Radeon HD 4730

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4730, which comes with core clock speeds of 700 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640(128x5) SPUs as well as 32 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX+		145 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

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

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ should be quite a bit (about 111%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24832 (111%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GTX+ is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		11808 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6208 (111%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at 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 can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. 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 ability to get to the max fill rate.