GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon R7 M260

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 M260, which has core clock speeds of 715 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 memory. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same bandwidth, so theoretically they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 will be quite a bit (more or less 54%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 M260. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260		17160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9240 (54%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 should be a bit (more or less 15%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon R7 M260, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		6600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260		5720 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 880 (15%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.