GeForce 9800 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7770, which has core speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7770		80 Watts
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		105 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (31%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7770 should theoretically be much better than the GeForce 9800 GT 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		72000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 14400 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 should be a little bit (approximately 19%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 9800 GT 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (19%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7770 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (67%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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 higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.