GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which has GPU core speed of 750 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 153 Watts (78%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be much faster than the GeForce 9800 GX2 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (80%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should be much (about 28%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16800 (28%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (25%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.