GeForce 9800 GTX+ vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which features core clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR4 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX+		145 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ should be 11% quicker than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		70400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 6848 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ should be quite a bit (about 89%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22232 (89%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GTX+ is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		11808 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1808 (18%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels 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 one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.