GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M385X, which has a core clock speed of 1100 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 M385X should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (500%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X is quite a bit (about 133%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35200 (133%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X should be quite a bit (about 167%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11000 (167%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.