GeForce 9600 GT 512MB vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 M260X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 825 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this model. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R7 M260X is 11% quicker than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		64000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GT 512MB should be a little bit (approximately 5%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R7 M260X. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		20800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1000 (5%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3800 (58%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.