GeForce 9800 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7870, which comes with 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 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		105 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7870 will be 167% faster than the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (167%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be quite a bit (more or less 138%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 46400 (138%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22400 (233%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.