GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 590, which comes with clock speeds of 1469 MHz on the GPU, and 2000 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 22 Watts (13%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 590, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9800 GX2 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 134144 (105%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 should be much (more or less 175%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 9800 GX2. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 134736 (175%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 590 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 27808 (145%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.