GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB vs Radeon R7 250X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 250X, which has a core clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1125 MHz. It also features a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		84 Watts
Radeon R7 250X		95 Watts
	Difference: 11 Watts (13%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R7 250X should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X		72000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 33600 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 250X will be a lot (about 52%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13600 (52%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 250X is much (more or less 142%) better at AA than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB, and capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9400 (142%)

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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of 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 speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount 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 fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.