GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon R7 M260

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R7 M260, which has clock speeds of 715 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 memory. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 9800 GX2 should be 700% faster than the Radeon R7 M260 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M260		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (700%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should be quite a bit (about 348%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 M260. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260		17160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 59640 (348%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should be a lot (approximately 236%) better at AA than the Radeon R7 M260, and also able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260		5720 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13480 (236%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.