GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7770, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1125 MHz on this model. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7770		80 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX		140 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (75%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7770 should in theory be a little bit faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		72000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (2%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX is a bit (about 8%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 7770. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7770		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (8%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7770 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5200 (48%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.