GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 M260X, which comes with clock speeds of 825 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. 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

In theory, the Radeon R7 M260X will be 67% faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		64000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (67%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB is much (approximately 33%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon R7 M260X. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6600 (33%)

Pixel Rate

Both cards have exactly the same pixel fill rate, so in theory they should perform equally good at at FSAA, and be able to handle the same resolutions. (explain)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it 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, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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 reach the max fill rate.