GeForce 9600 GT 512MB vs Radeon R7 250X 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 250X 2GB, which has clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R7 250X 2GB should be 25% faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X 2GB		72000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 14400 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 250X 2GB should be quite a bit (approximately 92%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X 2GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19200 (92%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R7 250X 2GB is superior to the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X 2GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (54%)

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 across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 amount 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 card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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 maximum fill rate.