GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 5570

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5570, which comes with clock speeds of 650 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 400(80x5) SPUs as well as 20 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

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

As far as performance goes, the GeForce 9800 GX2 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to 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 much (more or less 491%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5570. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should be a lot (about 269%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5570, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.