GeForce 9800 GT 512MB vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M270X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1125 MHz on this particular card. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M270X is 25% faster than the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 14400 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GT 512MB will be a small bit (approximately 16%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M270X. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		33600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4600 (16%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M270X is superior to the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2000 (21%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR 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 higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.