GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which has GPU clock speed of 625 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR4 memory set to run at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

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% faster than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should be a lot (approximately 207%) faster with regards to texture filtering 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

The GeForce 9800 GX2 will be a lot (approximately 92%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.