GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB vs Radeon R7 250

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 250, which features a clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1150 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 384 SPUs, 24 Texture Address Units, 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 GSO 384MB		84 Watts
	Difference: 19 Watts (29%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R7 250 should be 92% faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		73600 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 35200 (92%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB is a little bit (about 10%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R7 250. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 250		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (10%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 250 will be quite a bit (about 21%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		8000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1400 (21%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.