GeForce 9400 GT 256MB vs Radeon R7 M260

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 M260, which comes with GPU core speed of 715 MHz, and 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM set to run at 1000 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is made up of 384 SPUs, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R7 M260 will be 25% quicker than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		16000 MB/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260 should be much (approximately 290%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		17160 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		4400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12760 (290%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R7 M260 is superior to the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		5720 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		2200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3520 (160%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, 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 is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at 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 write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.