GeForce 9500 GT DDR2 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7850, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 860 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1200 MHz on this model. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		50 Watts
Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
	Difference: 80 Watts (160%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7850 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 9500 GT DDR2 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 137600 (860%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is much (approximately 525%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9500 GT DDR2. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 46240 (525%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23120 (525%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka 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 memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.