GeForce 9800 GX2 vs GeForce GTX 560 Ti

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, which has core clock speeds of 822 MHz on the GPU, and 1002 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 384 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti		170 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 27 Watts (16%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 560 Ti should in theory perform a little bit faster than the GeForce 9800 GX2 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti		128256 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 256 (0%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should be a lot (approximately 46%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		52608 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24192 (46%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 560 Ti is superior to the GeForce 9800 GX2, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti		26304 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7104 (37%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

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