GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB vs Radeon R9 380 4G

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 380 4G, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 970 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1425 MHz on this specific card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		90 Watts
Radeon R9 380 4G		190 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (111%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 380 4G should be much faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 4G is quite a bit (approximately 248%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		108640 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 77440 (248%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 4G should be a lot (approximately 198%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		31040 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.