GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB vs Radeon R9 M395X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M395X, which comes with a clock speed of 723 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		84 Watts
Radeon R9 M395X		125 Watts
	Difference: 41 Watts (49%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M395X, in theory, should be much faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (317%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M395X will be much (about 251%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		92544 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 66144 (251%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M395X is superior to the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		23136 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16536 (251%)

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 transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 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 AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock 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 output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.