GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4790, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 600 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 800 MHz on this specific model. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 9800 GX2 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4790 in general. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 is much (more or less 300%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 57600 (300%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GX2 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (100%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.