GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

The GeForce 9800 GX2 features a GPU clock speed of 600 MHz, and the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM runs at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 128 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6790, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 840 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1050 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 800 SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce 9800 GX2 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6790 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce 9800 GX2	Radeon HD 6790
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	Mar 2008	April 2011
Code Name	G92	Barts LE
Fab Process	65 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	512 MB (x2)	1024 MB
Core Speed	600 MHz (x2)	840 MHz
Shader Speed	1500 MHz (x2)	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1000 MHz (x2)	1050 MHz
Unified Shaders	128 (x2)	800
Texture Mapping Units	64 (x2)	40
Render Output Units	16 (x2)	16
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit (x2)	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	197 watts	150 watts
Shader Model	4.0	5.0
Bandwidth	128000 MB/sec	134400 MB/sec
Texel Rate	76800 Mtexels/sec	33600 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	19200 Mpixels/sec	13440 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.