GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 280X, which comes with GPU clock speed of 850 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1500 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also features 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		90 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 160 Watts (178%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280X should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 230400 (400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X will be much (approximately 249%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 77600 (249%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be a lot (about 162%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16800 (162%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's 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 rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.