GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3 vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 M260X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 825 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R7 M260X, in theory, should be a lot faster than the GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3 in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		64000 MB/sec
GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3		25600 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260X is a lot (more or less 125%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11000 (125%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R7 M260X is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		6600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2200 (50%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.