GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon R7 250X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 250X, which features a clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1125 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250X		95 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 102 Watts (107%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce 9800 GX2 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon R7 250X overall. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 250X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 56000 (78%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 will be much (approximately 92%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 250X. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 250X		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36800 (92%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GX2 is a better choice, though only just barely. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 250X		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (20%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.