GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 290, which features clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 103 Watts (52%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 290 should be a lot faster than the GeForce 9800 GX2 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 192000 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is quite a bit (more or less 67%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GX2. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 51200 (67%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is quite a bit (more or less 167%) more effective at AA than the GeForce 9800 GX2, and able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 32000 (167%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.