GeForce 9500 GT DDR2 vs Radeon R7 M260

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 M260, which has clock speeds of 715 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 384 SPUs as well as 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same bandwidth, so theoretically they should perform exactly the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260 is a lot (approximately 95%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9500 GT DDR2. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		17160 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8360 (95%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260 should be much (more or less 30%) better at FSAA than the GeForce 9500 GT DDR2, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		5720 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1320 (30%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is 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 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at 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 the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.