GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7790, which comes with core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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 theoretically be a lot faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 will be a lot (more or less 112%) better at anisotropic filtering 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 should be a lot (more or less 142%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of 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.