GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280, which comes with core clock speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 53 Watts (27%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 280 should in theory be much better than the GeForce 9800 GX2 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be much (more or less 36%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 9800 GX2. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27696 (36%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10656 (56%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill 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 get to the max fill rate.