GeForce 9500 GT DDR2 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6790, which has a clock frequency of 840 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1050 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 800 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		50 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (200%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6790 should in theory be much superior to the GeForce 9500 GT DDR2 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 118400 (740%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 will be a lot (more or less 282%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 9500 GT DDR2. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24800 (282%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6790 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9040 (205%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 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 AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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 of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.