GeForce 9400 GT 256MB vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7770, which has core speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		50 Watts
Radeon HD 7770		80 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (60%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7770 should in theory perform a lot faster than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		72000 MB/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 59200 (463%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 should be much (approximately 809%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		4400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35600 (809%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7770 is superior to the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		2200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13800 (627%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure 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 card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.