GeForce GTX 460 SE vs Radeon HD 4830 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 575 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR4 memory set to run at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 640(128x5) Stream Processors, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 1GB		95 Watts
GeForce GTX 460 SE		150 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (58%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 460 SE should in theory be much faster than the Radeon HD 4830 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		108800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (89%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 SE is quite a bit (about 70%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		31200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (70%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 SE is superior to the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		20800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11600 (126%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. 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 ability to reach the maximum fill rate.