GeForce 9600 GT 512MB vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 M260X, which comes with a clock speed of 825 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 384 SPUs, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R7 M260X should in theory be a small bit faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		64000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GT 512MB will be a small bit (about 5%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R7 M260X. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		20800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1000 (5%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3800 (58%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

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