GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 4830 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, which has core clock speeds of 575 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 512MB		95 Watts
GeForce GTS 450		106 Watts
	Difference: 11 Watts (12%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTS 450 should theoretically be just a bit superior to the Radeon HD 4830 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 128 (0%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 will be quite a bit (approximately 36%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6656 (36%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTS 450 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3328 (36%)

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 in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should 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 number 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of 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 number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. 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 rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.