GeForce 9600 GT 1GB 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 along with 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 GT 1GB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 280 Watts (295%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7990, in theory, should perform much faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 518400 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 should be quite a bit (about 1069%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 222400 (1069%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is superior to the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling 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 the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.