GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which features GPU core speed of 900 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1375 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 896 Stream Processors, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX		140 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (87%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 M280X should be much faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 17600 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X should be just a bit (more or less 17%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (17%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X should be a lot (about 33%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9800 GTX, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3600 (33%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.