GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 4650 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4650 512MB, which comes with clock speeds of 600 MHz on the GPU, and 500 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR2 memory. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4650 512MB		55 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 142 Watts (258%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce 9800 GX2 should in theory be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 4650 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4650 512MB		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (700%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 is much (more or less 300%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4650 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4650 512MB		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 57600 (300%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 will be quite a bit (about 300%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 4650 512MB, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4650 512MB		4800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14400 (300%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. 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 output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.