GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 270, which has core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 47 Watts (31%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 270 should perform much faster than the GeForce 9800 GX2 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (40%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 is a little bit (approximately 7%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 270. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (7%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 will be a lot (more or less 50%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce 9800 GX2, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (50%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.