GeForce 9800 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6790, which comes with a core clock frequency of 840 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1050 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 800 SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6790 will be 133% faster than the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (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 rate, so theoretically they should be equally good at at anisotropic filtering. (explain)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6790 is the winner, by far. (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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.