GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 6770

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6770, which comes with core speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6770		108 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 89 Watts (82%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 9800 GX2, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 6770 overall. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6770		67200 MB/sec
	Difference: 60800 (90%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 is quite a bit (more or less 113%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6770. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6770		36000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40800 (113%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GX2 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6770		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (33%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.