GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M390X, which has GPU clock speed of 723 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2048 Stream Processors, 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 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
	Difference: 46 Watts (37%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 M390X should perform much faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 56320 (54%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X is quite a bit (about 136%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 53376 (136%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M390X is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8448 (58%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs 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 also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.