GeForce 9800 GTX+ vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870, which has core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		145 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (21%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870 should in theory perform a lot faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX+ overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 83200 (118%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 is much (approximately 69%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 9800 GTX+. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32768 (69%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20192 (171%)

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 data (in units of 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 speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.