GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7790, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this model. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		84 Watts
Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
	Difference: 1 Watts (1%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7790 should in theory perform much faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (500%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 should be much (approximately 112%) better at AF than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29600 (112%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 is quite a bit (more or less 142%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9400 (142%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.