3DMark Vantage, and feature tests
The use of the non-PhysX-enabled driver shows that the GeForce 9800 GTX+ just beats out the Radeon HD 4850 in the default test.
Test four, GPU Cloth, stresses the vertex shading, geometry shading and stream-out features of the hardware, where stream out is used to recycle the cloth vertices, according to Futuremark. Here, NVIDIA has the edge, and the 9800 GTX+ is just a little ahead of the card it effectively replaces.
Test six, Perlin Noise, is a technique used for procedural texturing. As such, it's highly maths-intensive to compute in a pixel-shader and stresses the arithmetic (read grunt) of a GPU.
We cannot explain the performance disparity between the two GeForce 9800 GTX cards, and we've double-checked the results. Whatever the underlying cause, they're no match for the TFLOPS compute power of the twin Radeon HD 48x0s.
