GeForce 9800 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7790, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this specific card. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		105 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (24%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7790 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the GeForce 9800 GT 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (67%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 should be a lot (approximately 67%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GT 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22400 (67%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7790 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (67%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.