GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7990, which comes with a core clock frequency of 950 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GTX		140 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 235 Watts (168%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7990 should be a lot faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 505600 (718%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 is a lot (approximately 463%) better at AF than the GeForce 9800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 200000 (463%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 will be quite a bit (about 463%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce 9800 GTX, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 50000 (463%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel 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 potential to get to the max fill rate.