GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 M260X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 825 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R7 M260X should perform much faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		64000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (67%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB will be a lot (more or less 33%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R7 M260X. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6600 (33%)

Pixel Rate

Both cards have the exact same pixel rate, so in theory they should perform equally good at at FSAA, and be able to handle the same screen 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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

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