GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 260X, which features a clock speed of 1100 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1625 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		84 Watts
Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (37%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R7 260X should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 65600 (171%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X will be a lot (more or less 133%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35200 (133%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X is much (more or less 167%) more effective at AA than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11000 (167%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.