GeForce 9800 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which comes with clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR4 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		105 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 4850 2GB should be a little bit faster than the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 5952 (10%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GT 512MB will be much (approximately 34%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		33600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8600 (34%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4850 2GB is superior to the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 400 (4%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

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