GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M380, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this particular card. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 9800 GX2 should perform much faster than the Radeon R9 M380 in general. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (33%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 is a lot (approximately 92%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M380. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36800 (92%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GX2 is a better choice, but not by far. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (20%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.