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GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB

Intro

The GeForce GTX 480 uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 700 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 924 MHz on this card. It features 480 SPUs along with 60 TAUs and 48 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, which features a GPU core clock speed of 625 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR3 RAM set to run at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 480 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480 177408 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB 127104 MB/sec
Difference: 50304 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB is a small bit (approximately 19%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB 50000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480 42000 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 8000 (19%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 480 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480 33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB 20000 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 13600 (68%)

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

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GeForce GTX 480

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model GeForce GTX 480 Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB
Manufacturer nVidia AMD
Year March 2010 Nov 7, 2008
Code Name GF100 R700
Memory 1536 MB 1024 MB (x2)
Core Speed 700 MHz 625 MHz (x2)
Memory Speed 3696 MHz 1986 MHz (x2)
Power (Max TDP) 250 watts 250 watts
Bandwidth 177408 MB/sec 127104 MB/sec
Texel Rate 42000 Mtexels/sec 50000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 33600 Mpixels/sec 20000 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 480 800(160x5) (x2)
Texture Mapping Units 60 40 (x2)
Render Output Units 48 16 (x2)
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR3
Bus Width 384-bit 256-bit (x2)
Fab Process 40 nm 55 nm
Transistors 3000 million 956 million
Bus PCIe x16 PCIe 2.0 x16 (PCIe bridge)
DirectX Version DirectX 11 DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version OpenGL 4.1 OpenGL 3.0

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number 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 clock 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.

Display Prices

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GeForce GTX 480

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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