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GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon R5 M255

Intro

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 comes with a core clock frequency of 550 MHz and a DDR2 memory frequency of 500 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 65 nm design. It is comprised of 96 SPUs, 48 Texture Address Units, and 12 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon R5 M255, which comes with GPU clock speed of 940 MHz, and 2048 MB of DDR3 memory running at 1000 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is made up of 320 Stream Processors, 20 TAUs, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same memory bandwidth, so in theory they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 is a lot (more or less 40%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R5 M255. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M255		18800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7600 (40%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R5 M255 is a better choice, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon R5 M255		7520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 920 (14%)

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

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GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512

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Radeon R5 M255

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model	GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512	Radeon R5 M255
Manufacturer	nVidia	AMD
Year	September 2008	June 2014
Code Name	G92	Jet Pro
Memory	512 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	550 MHz	940 MHz
Memory Speed	1000 MHz	2000 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	84 watts	(Unknown) watts
Bandwidth	16000 MB/sec	16000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	26400 Mtexels/sec	18800 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	6600 Mpixels/sec	7520 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	96	320
Texture Mapping Units	48	20
Render Output Units	12	8
Bus Type	DDR2	DDR3
Bus Width	128-bit	64-bit
Fab Process	65 nm	28 nm
Transistors	754 million	(Unknown) million
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe 3.0 x8
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11.2
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 4.3

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.

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