GeForce 9400 GT 256MB vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7770, which comes with clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		50 Watts
Radeon HD 7770		80 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (60%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7770 should in theory be a lot better than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		72000 MB/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 59200 (463%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 is much (approximately 809%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		4400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35600 (809%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7770 is superior to the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		2200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13800 (627%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.