GeForce 9800 GTX+ vs Radeon HD 4830 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, which comes with a core clock frequency of 575 MHz and a GDDR4 memory frequency of 900 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is made up of 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 1GB		95 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX+		145 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (53%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ will be 22% faster than the Radeon HD 4830 1GB in general, because of its greater data rate. (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 a lot (about 157%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4830 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28832 (157%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GTX+ is superior to the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, by far. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		11808 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2608 (28%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.