GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 M260X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 825 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific model. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R7 M260X should theoretically perform a bit faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		64000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB will be a lot (about 58%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R7 M260X. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		31200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11400 (58%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB is much (about 58%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon R7 M260X, and should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3800 (58%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.