GeForce 9600 GT 512MB vs Radeon R7 250

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 250, which comes with core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1150 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250		65 Watts
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		95 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (46%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R7 250 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		73600 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (28%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 250 should be just a bit (approximately 15%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		24000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (15%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB is superior to the Radeon R7 250, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 250		8000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (30%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be 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 this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number 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 calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.