GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 5570

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5570, which has a clock frequency of 650 MHz and a DDR3 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 400(80x5) SPUs, 20 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5570		43 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 154 Watts (358%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce 9800 GX2 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5570 in general. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5570		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 99200 (344%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 is quite a bit (about 491%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5570. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5570		13000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 63800 (491%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GX2 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5570		5200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14000 (269%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at 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 record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.