GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R7 260X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1625 MHz on this card. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		84 Watts
Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (37%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R7 260X should perform much faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 88000 (550%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X is a lot (approximately 133%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35200 (133%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X is a lot (approximately 167%) better at FSAA than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.