GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon R9 390X 8G

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 390X 8G, which features GPU clock speed of 1050 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1500 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also features 2816 Stream Processors, 176 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
Radeon R9 390X 8G		275 Watts
	Difference: 78 Watts (40%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 390X 8G should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 9800 GX2 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		384000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 256000 (200%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G is a lot (about 141%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GX2. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		184800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 108000 (141%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G is quite a bit (about 250%) better at AA than the GeForce 9800 GX2, and will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		67200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 48000 (250%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. 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 also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.