GeForce 9400 GT 256MB vs Radeon R7 M260

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R7 M260, which has a clock speed of 715 MHz and a DDR3 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 64-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 384 SPUs, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R7 M260, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		16000 MB/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260 should be a lot (more or less 290%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		17160 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		4400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12760 (290%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R7 M260 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		5720 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		2200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3520 (160%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.