GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which has core clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR4 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 87 Watts (79%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 9800 GX2 is 101% quicker than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 64448 (101%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 will be a lot (more or less 207%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 51800 (207%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GX2 is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9200 (92%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's 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 applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.