GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M390X, which has a clock speed of 723 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M390X		125 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 72 Watts (58%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M390X should in theory be a lot faster than the GeForce 9800 GX2 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X should be quite a bit (about 21%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GX2. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15744 (21%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M390X is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3936 (21%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a 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 - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.