GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB vs Radeon R7 250

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R7 250, which features core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1150 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 384 SPUs as well as 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250		65 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		90 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (38%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R7 250 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB should be much (more or less 30%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R7 250. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		31200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 250		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (30%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB is a lot (approximately 30%) better at AA than the Radeon R7 250, and will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can 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 Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.