GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon R5 M255

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R5 M255, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 940 MHz. The DDR3 RAM works at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this model. It features 320 SPUs along with 20 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same memory bandwidth, so theoretically they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 should be quite a bit (approximately 40%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R5 M255. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M255		18800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7600 (40%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R5 M255 is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon R5 M255		7520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 920 (14%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.