GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 4870 1GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 1GB		150 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 47 Watts (31%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 9800 GX2 should perform a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should be a lot (approximately 156%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 46800 (156%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 is much (more or less 60%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, and able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (60%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.