GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M380, which has clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M380, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (67%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 should be quite a bit (about 92%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19200 (92%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M380 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 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. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.