GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon R7 250X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 250X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1125 MHz on this model. 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 R7 250X		95 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 102 Watts (107%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 9800 GX2 will be 78% faster than the Radeon R7 250X overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 250X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 56000 (78%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should be much (more or less 92%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R7 250X. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 250X		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36800 (92%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GX2 is the winner, though not by far. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 250X		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (20%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number 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 in a second.

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