GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which has GPU core speed of 800 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also features 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB should perform a lot faster than the GeForce 9800 GX2 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB is a little bit (about 17%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 9800 GX2. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (17%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB is much (approximately 33%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9800 GX2, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.