GeForce 9800 GTX+ vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7990, which has core speeds of 950 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		145 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 230 Watts (159%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7990, in theory, should perform 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 (more or less 415%) better at AF than the GeForce 9800 GTX+. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 195968 (415%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is superior to the GeForce 9800 GTX+, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 48992 (415%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.