GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7990, which has core speeds of 950 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		84 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 291 Watts (346%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7990 will be 1400% faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 537600 (1400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 is a lot (approximately 821%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 216800 (821%)

Pixel Rate

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

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.