GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon R9 270X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 270X, which has GPU clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1400 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1280 Stream Processors, 80 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270X		180 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 17 Watts (9%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 270X should be 40% quicker than the GeForce 9800 GX2 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		179200 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270X should be a small bit (more or less 4%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 9800 GX2. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (4%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270X is superior to the GeForce 9800 GX2, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (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.

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure 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 card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.