GeForce 9800 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6790, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 840 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1050 MHz on this specific card. It features 800 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		105 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6790 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 76800 (133%)

Texel Rate

Both cards have exactly the same texel fill rate, so in theory they should perform equally good at at anisotropic filtering. (explain)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6790 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3840 (40%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.