GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon R9 380 4G

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 380 4G, which has core clock speeds of 970 MHz on the GPU, and 1425 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GTX		140 Watts
Radeon R9 380 4G		190 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (36%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 380 4G should perform a lot faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		182400 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (159%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 4G is quite a bit (more or less 151%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		108640 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 65440 (151%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380 4G is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		31040 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20240 (187%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.