GeForce GTX 960M vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 M260X, which has a core clock speed of 825 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also features a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 384 SPUs, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960M should be much (approximately 121%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 M260X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24040 (121%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960M is a lot (approximately 166%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R7 M260X, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10936 (166%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. 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 get to the maximum fill rate.