GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3 vs Radeon R5 M255

Intro

The GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3 has a core clock speed of 550 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 800 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is made up of 32 SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 8 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon R5 M255, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 940 MHz. The DDR3 memory runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 320 SPUs as well as 20 TAUs and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.