GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon R5 M255

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R5 M255, which comes with GPU core speed of 940 MHz, and 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is made up of 320 Stream Processors, 20 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same bandwidth, so in theory they should have the same performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 is much (about 40%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R5 M255. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M255		18800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7600 (40%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R5 M255 should be a little bit (more or less 14%) better at FSAA than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R5 M255		7520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 920 (14%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.