GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 590, which comes with a core clock speed of 1469 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 2000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 12 nm design. It features 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 22 Watts (13%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon RX 590 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9800 GX2 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 134144 (105%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 will be a lot (more or less 175%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GX2. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 134736 (175%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 will be a lot (about 145%) more effective at AA than the GeForce 9800 GX2, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 27808 (145%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total 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 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 can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.