GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon R9 270X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 270X, which comes with a core clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1400 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
Radeon R9 270X		180 Watts
	Difference: 9 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 270X should perform much faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		179200 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 75520 (73%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270X will be a lot (more or less 104%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40832 (104%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 270X will be quite a bit (approximately 118%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 Ultra, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17312 (118%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.