GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M380, which has GPU clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1500 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 640 Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M380 should be 150% quicker than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 will be a lot (approximately 52%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13600 (52%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 should be a lot (about 142%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9400 (142%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.