GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon RX 460 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 460 2GB, which has GPU clock speed of 1090 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1750 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 896 Stream Processors, 56 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 460 2GB		75 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 122 Watts (163%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 9800 GX2 should perform just a bit faster than the Radeon RX 460 2GB overall. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (14%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 is quite a bit (about 26%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 460 2GB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		61040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15760 (26%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GX2 is superior to the Radeon RX 460 2GB, though only just barely. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		17440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1760 (10%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.