GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 4650 1GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4650 1GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 600 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 700 MHz on this particular card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4650 1GB		55 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 142 Watts (258%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce 9800 GX2 should in theory be much better than the Radeon HD 4650 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4650 1GB		22400 MB/sec
	Difference: 105600 (471%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should be much (approximately 300%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4650 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4650 1GB		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 57600 (300%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should be much (more or less 300%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4650 1GB, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4650 1GB		4800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14400 (300%)

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

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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