GeForce 9800 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 4830 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, which has clock speeds of 575 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 512MB		95 Watts
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		105 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (11%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same memory bandwidth, so in theory they should perform exactly the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GT 1GB will be much (approximately 83%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		33600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15200 (83%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GT 1GB will be a bit (approximately 4%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		9600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		9200 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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core 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 card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.