GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which has clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 12 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should in theory be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9800 GX2 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (50%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT will be a little bit (approximately 16%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 9800 GX2. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12000 (16%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10400 (54%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 can be applied in one 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 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 number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.