GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon HD 4830 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 575 MHz. The GDDR4 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 640(128x5) SPUs as well as 32 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 1GB		95 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX		140 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (47%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 9800 GTX should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4830 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (22%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX will be much (approximately 135%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24800 (135%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GTX is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (17%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes 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 it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.