GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7950, which features clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1536 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3		50 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (300%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7950 should be 838% quicker than the GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3		25600 MB/sec
	Difference: 214400 (838%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 is quite a bit (approximately 918%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 80800 (918%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7950 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21200 (482%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.