GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which features core clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3		50 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 135 Watts (270%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should in theory be a lot better than the GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3		25600 MB/sec
	Difference: 166400 (650%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is a lot (approximately 909%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 80000 (909%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is superior to the GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25200 (573%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR 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 figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.