GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 4830 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 575 MHz. The GDDR3 memory works at a frequency of 900 MHz on this specific model. It features 640(128x5) SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 512MB		95 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 120 Watts (126%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 470 should be 133% faster than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 76320 (133%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 is a lot (about 85%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15592 (85%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 470 is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15080 (164%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one 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 it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.