GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon RX 460

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 460, which comes with core clock speeds of 1090 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 460		75 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 122 Watts (163%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 9800 GX2 should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon RX 460 in general. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 460		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (14%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 is much (approximately 26%) more effective at AF than the Radeon RX 460. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 460		61040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15760 (26%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GX2 is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 460		17440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1760 (10%)

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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.