GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon R7 360

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 360, which has GPU clock speed of 1050 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1625 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 768 SPUs, 48 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 360		100 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 97 Watts (97%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should theoretically perform a lot faster than the Radeon R7 360 overall. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 360		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 24000 (23%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 is a lot (approximately 52%) better at AF than the Radeon R7 360. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 360		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26400 (52%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GX2 is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 360		16800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (14%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.