GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3 vs Radeon R9 M265X

Intro

The GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3 uses a 55 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 550 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 800 MHz on this specific model. It features 32 SPUs as well as 16 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M265X, which has core clock speeds of 575 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.