GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 285, which comes with core clock speeds of 918 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 7 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 285 should in theory be a lot better than the GeForce 9800 GX2 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 48000 (38%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 is much (more or less 34%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 9800 GX2. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26016 (34%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 should be much (approximately 53%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9800 GX2, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10176 (53%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type 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 AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.