GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M390X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 723 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M390X		125 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 72 Watts (58%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M390X, in theory, should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9800 GX2 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X is quite a bit (more or less 21%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 9800 GX2. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15744 (21%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M390X is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3936 (21%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.