GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M380, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1500 MHz on this specific card. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 M380 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (67%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 will be quite a bit (approximately 28%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8800 (28%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 is quite a bit (about 54%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (54%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.