GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

The GeForce 9800 GX2 has core clock speeds of 600 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 128 SPUs along with 64 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6870, which features core speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1120 SPUs as well as 56 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce 9800 GX2 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6870 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce 9800 GX2	Radeon HD 6870
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	Mar 2008	October 2010
Code Name	G92	Barts XT
Fab Process	65 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe x16
Memory	512 MB (x2)	1024 MB
Core Speed	600 MHz (x2)	900 MHz
Shader Speed	1500 MHz (x2)	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1000 MHz (x2)	1050 MHz
Unified Shaders	128 (x2)	1120
Texture Mapping Units	64 (x2)	56
Render Output Units	16 (x2)	32
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit (x2)	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	197 watts	151 watts
Shader Model	4.0	5.0
Bandwidth	128000 MB/sec	134400 MB/sec
Texel Rate	76800 Mtexels/sec	50400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	19200 Mpixels/sec	28800 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.