GeForce 9800 GTX+ vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7770, which makes use of a 28 nm design. ATi has set the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1125 MHz on this card. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7770		80 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX+		145 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (81%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7770 should theoretically be a little bit better than the GeForce 9800 GTX+ in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ will be a small bit (approximately 18%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7770. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7770		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7232 (18%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7770 is superior to the GeForce 9800 GTX+, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4192 (36%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

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