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GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon R5 M255

Intro

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 comes with clock speeds of 550 MHz on the GPU, and 500 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR2 memory. It features 96 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 12 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon R5 M255, which features GPU clock speed of 940 MHz, and 2048 MB of DDR3 memory set to run at 1000 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also features 320 SPUs, 20 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

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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 the same performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 should be much (approximately 40%) better at texture filtering 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 using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R5 M255 is superior to the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512, 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 MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.

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