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GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

The GeForce 9800 GX2 uses a 65 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 600 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 128 SPUs as well as 64 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5870, which features a clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1600(320x5) SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5870 188 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2 197 Watts
Difference: 9 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5870 should in theory be a bit superior to the GeForce 9800 GX2 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870 153600 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2 128000 MB/sec
Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should be just a bit (approximately 13%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2 76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870 68000 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 8800 (13%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be quite a bit (more or less 42%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce 9800 GX2, and able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870 27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2 19200 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 8000 (42%)

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

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GeForce 9800 GX2

Amazon.com

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Radeon HD 5870

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model GeForce 9800 GX2 Radeon HD 5870
Manufacturer nVidia AMD
Year Mar 2008 September 23, 2009
Code Name G92 Cypress XT
Memory 512 MB (x2) 1024 MB
Core Speed 600 MHz (x2) 850 MHz
Memory Speed 2000 MHz (x2) 4800 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 197 watts 188 watts
Bandwidth 128000 MB/sec 153600 MB/sec
Texel Rate 76800 Mtexels/sec 68000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 19200 Mpixels/sec 27200 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 128 (x2) 1600(320x5)
Texture Mapping Units 64 (x2) 80
Render Output Units 16 (x2) 32
Bus Type GDDR3 GDDR5
Bus Width 256-bit (x2) 256-bit
Fab Process 65 nm 40 nm
Transistors 754 million 2154 million
Bus PCIe x16 2.0 PCIe 2.1 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 10 DirectX 11
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.0 OpenGL 3.2

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.

Display Prices

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GeForce 9800 GX2

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 5870

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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