GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon R5 M255

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R5 M255, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 940 MHz. The DDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 320 SPUs as well as 20 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 9800 GX2, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the Radeon R5 M255 overall. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M255		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (700%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 will be quite a bit (about 309%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R5 M255. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M255		18800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58000 (309%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should be much (approximately 155%) better at AA than the Radeon R5 M255, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M255		7520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11680 (155%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could 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 Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.