GeForce 9400 GT 256MB vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7770, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1125 MHz on this particular card. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units 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

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7770 should theoretically be a lot better than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 will be quite a bit (about 809%) better 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

The Radeon HD 7770 will be a lot (more or less 627%) better at FSAA than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.