GeForce 9800 GT 512MB vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which comes with GPU clock speed of 900 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1375 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		105 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (40%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 M280X should in theory be much superior to the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 30400 (53%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X will be quite a bit (more or less 50%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16800 (50%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X is a lot (about 50%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (50%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling 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 record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.