GeForce 9800 GTX+ vs Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, which has a GPU core clock speed of 625 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR3 RAM running at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		145 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		250 Watts
	Difference: 105 Watts (72%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX+ overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 56704 (81%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB should be a little bit (more or less 6%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GTX+. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2768 (6%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8192 (69%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.