GeForce 9800 GX2 vs GeForce GTX 460 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 460 1GB, which uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 675 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 900 MHz on this card. It features 336 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 1GB		160 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 37 Watts (23%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should in theory perform a small bit faster than the GeForce GTX 460 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 will be a lot (approximately 103%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		37800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39000 (103%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 1GB will be just a bit (about 13%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce 9800 GX2, and able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 1GB		21600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (13%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.