GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7990, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 950 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this specific card. 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 1.5GB		84 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 291 Watts (346%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7990 is 1400% quicker than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 537600 (1400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 will be much (approximately 821%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 216800 (821%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is superior to the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.