GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 4830 1GB

Intro

The GeForce 9800 GX2 features a core clock speed of 600 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 65 nm design. It features 128 SPUs, 64 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 575 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR4 RAM running at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 640(128x5) Stream Processors, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its 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 speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.