GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M380, which comes with core speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 M380 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 will be quite a bit (more or less 52%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13600 (52%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 will be much (approximately 142%) better at AA than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9400 (142%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

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