GeForce 9600 GT 512MB vs Radeon R9 380 4G

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 380 4G, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 970 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1425 MHz on this card. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		95 Watts
Radeon R9 380 4G		190 Watts
	Difference: 95 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 380 4G is 217% faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		182400 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 124800 (217%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 4G should be quite a bit (more or less 422%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		108640 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 87840 (422%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380 4G is superior to the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		31040 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20640 (198%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends 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.