GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon RX 460

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 460, which comes with core clock speeds of 1090 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 9800 GX2 is 14% faster than the Radeon RX 460 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should be quite a bit (about 26%) better at AF than the Radeon RX 460. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GX2 is a better choice, but only just. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 460		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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling 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 that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs 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 fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.