GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R7 260X, which has a core clock speed of 1100 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1625 MHz. It also features a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 82 Watts (71%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 9800 GX2 should be a lot faster than the Radeon R7 260X overall. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 24000 (23%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 will be much (more or less 25%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 260X. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15200 (25%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 is a little bit (about 9%) better at AA than the Radeon R7 260X, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (9%)

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 max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel 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.