GeForce 9800 GTX+ vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ has a GPU core speed of 738 MHz, and the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM runs at 1100 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 128 Stream Processors, 64 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 M260X, which has GPU core speed of 825 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 384 Stream Processors, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.