GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7950, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 3 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7950 should theoretically perform a lot faster than the GeForce 9800 GX2 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 should be a little bit (approximately 17%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GX2. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (17%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7950 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (33%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in MB 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. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.