GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7990, which comes with GPU clock speed of 950 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1500 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also features 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 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 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 291 Watts (346%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7990 should theoretically be much better than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 560000 (3500%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 should be a lot (about 821%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 216800 (821%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 is much (about 821%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 54200 (821%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output 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 get to the max fill rate.