GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7770, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1125 MHz on this 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

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7770		80 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX		140 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (75%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7770 should theoretically be just a bit superior to the GeForce 9800 GTX overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		72000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (2%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX will be a bit (more or less 8%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7770. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7770		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (8%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 is quite a bit (about 48%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9800 GTX, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5200 (48%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of 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 fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.