GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 260X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1625 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 R7 260X		115 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 82 Watts (71%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should in theory be quite a bit faster than the Radeon R7 260X overall. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 24000 (23%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 will be a lot (approximately 25%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 260X. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15200 (25%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GX2 is superior to the Radeon R7 260X, but only just. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (9%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher 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 most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.