GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6990, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 830 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GTX		140 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 235 Watts (168%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6990 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 249600 (355%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be quite a bit (about 269%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 116160 (269%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is a lot (approximately 392%) more effective at AA than the GeForce 9800 GTX, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 42320 (392%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.