GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 M260X, which features clock speeds of 825 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 384 SPUs as well as 24 TAUs and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R7 M260X should in theory be a bit faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		64000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GT 1GB should be a small bit (about 5%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 M260X. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1000 (5%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.