GeForce 9800 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 4730

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4730, which has a core clock speed of 700 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 900 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 TAUs, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		105 Watts
Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GT 1GB will be quite a bit (more or less 50%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		33600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11200 (50%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GT 1GB is superior to the Radeon HD 4730, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		9600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (71%)

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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over 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 RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.