GeForce 9800 GT 1GB vs Radeon R9 270X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 270X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1400 MHz on this particular model. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		105 Watts
Radeon R9 270X		180 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (71%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 270X should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9800 GT 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		179200 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (211%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270X should be a lot (more or less 138%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GT 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 46400 (138%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270X is superior to the GeForce 9800 GT 1GB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22400 (233%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could 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 colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.