GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7990, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 950 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 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 512MB		90 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 285 Watts (317%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7990 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 518400 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 is much (about 679%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 212000 (679%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 50400 (485%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high 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 number of texture units 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.