GeForce 9800 GTX+ vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M390X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 723 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this specific model. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M390X		125 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX+		145 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (16%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M390X, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX+ in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 89600 (127%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X is a lot (more or less 96%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GTX+. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 45312 (96%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M390X is superior to the GeForce 9800 GTX+, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11328 (96%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.