GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 4650 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4650 1GB, which comes with a clock speed of 600 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 700 MHz. It also features a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is made up of 320(64x5) SPUs, 32 TAUs, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4650 1GB		55 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 142 Watts (258%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 9800 GX2 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4650 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4650 1GB		22400 MB/sec
	Difference: 105600 (471%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 will be quite a bit (more or less 300%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4650 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4650 1GB		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 57600 (300%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 is quite a bit (about 300%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 4650 1GB, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4650 1GB		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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.