GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs Radeon R7 M260

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 M260, which has core speeds of 715 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 memory. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 9600 GT 1GB should theoretically perform much faster than the Radeon R7 M260 overall. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M260		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 41600 (260%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GT 1GB will be a lot (about 21%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 M260. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260		17160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3640 (21%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		10400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260		5720 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4680 (82%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.