ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5770 vs ECS GeForce 9800 GT (NR9800GTE-1GQU-F (V1.0))

Because it has twice as many Raster Operations Pipelines (ROPs), the ECS GeForce 9800 GT graphics card provides substantially better pixel fill rate, even though its graphics clock is slower. Having higher pixel fillrate allows the GPU to draw more pixels on screen and off screen, which is beneficial for some 3D effects in games, or when playing at higher display resolutions.

Even so it has lower graphics frequency, the GeForce 9800 GT comes with many more Texture Mapping Units (TMUs), resulting in significantly better texture fill rate. Having better maximum texture fill rate allows the graphics card to utilize more sophisticated 3D effects and/or apply more textures to each texel, which improves visual appearance of games and generated images.

Single Precision performance, measured in GFLOPS or billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second, shows how good the graphics card is at running applications, that process mainly single-precision floating point data. As a rule, the faster stream processors or CUDA cores operate at, and the more cores / processors the graphics card has, the higher Single Precision performance will be. The ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5770 is much faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the graphics card will perform better in general computing applications. Since CUDA cores or stream processors are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

To speed up processing, the graphics cards store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the graphics card to run at higher screen resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. Memory type, speed, and width of memory interface all affect the bandwidth value. In this case, higher memory bandwidth of the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5770 GPU is due to higher clocked memory of better kind.