GeForce 9800 GTX+ vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ makes use of a 55 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 738 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1100 MHz on this card. It features 128 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 M260X, which comes with GPU clock speed of 825 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 384 SPUs, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units 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 output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.