GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7990, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 950 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1500 MHz on this model. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		84 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 291 Watts (346%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7990 should theoretically be much superior to the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 537600 (1400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 will be quite a bit (more or less 821%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 216800 (821%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution 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 768MB		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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, 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 figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.