GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB vs Radeon HD 4830 1GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, which comes with core clock speeds of 575 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR4 RAM. It features 640(128x5) SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 1GB		95 Watts
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB		143 Watts
	Difference: 48 Watts (51%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB should in theory be just a bit superior to the Radeon HD 4830 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB		63360 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 5760 (10%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB should be quite a bit (approximately 34%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB		24624 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6224 (34%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB is a little bit (about 12%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB		10260 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1060 (12%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are 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 this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output 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 get to the max fill rate.