GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 270, which comes with core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3		50 Watts
Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (200%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 270 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3		25600 MB/sec
	Difference: 153600 (600%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 should be a lot (approximately 718%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 63200 (718%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270 is superior to the GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24400 (555%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.