GeForce 9800 GT 1GB vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 M260X, which features a GPU core clock speed of 825 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 384 SPUs, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R7 M260X should be 11% quicker than the GeForce 9800 GT 1GB in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		64000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GT 1GB should be a lot (more or less 70%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R7 M260X. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		33600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13800 (70%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GT 1GB is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		9600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3000 (45%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. 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.