GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this particular card. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
	Difference: 96 Watts (128%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 8800 Ultra will be 18% quicker than the Radeon R9 M280X in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 15680 (18%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X should be quite a bit (more or less 29%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11232 (29%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 8800 Ultra will be a bit (more or less 2%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M280X, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 288 (2%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.