GeForce 9500 GT DDR2 vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M385X, which comes with core speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M385X, in theory, should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9500 GT DDR2 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (500%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X is much (about 600%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 9500 GT DDR2. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52800 (600%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M385X is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13200 (300%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. 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 potential to reach the max fill rate.