GeForce 9500 GT DDR2 vs Radeon R5 M255

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R5 M255, which has a GPU core clock speed of 940 MHz, and 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also features 320 Stream Processors, 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 in theory they should perform the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R5 M255 should be quite a bit (more or less 114%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 9500 GT DDR2. (explain)

Radeon R5 M255		18800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10000 (114%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R5 M255 will be a lot (more or less 71%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9500 GT DDR2, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R5 M255		7520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3120 (71%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.