GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon HD 4830 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, which has a clock frequency of 575 MHz and a GDDR4 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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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

Theoretically, the GeForce 9800 GTX should perform a lot 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 should be quite a bit (approximately 135%) faster with regards to AF 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

The GeForce 9800 GTX will be a small bit (more or less 17%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.