GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M270X, which features core clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M270X, in theory, should be a bit faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (2%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX is a lot (more or less 49%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M270X. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14200 (49%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M270X is a better choice, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 800 (7%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.