ATI Radeon 9250 vs VisionTek XTASY 9600 256MB

Since two graphics cards have the same number of Raster Operations Pipelines (ROPs) and the VisionTek XTASY 9600 256MB has higher operating frequency, its pixel fillrate is higher. Better pixel fill rate means that the card can draw more pixels on and off screen each second, increasing overall performance, unless there are bottlenecks somewhere else.

In modern games, pixel fillrate is not as important as texture fill rate. This parameter is defined as the number of TMUs (Texture Mapping Units), multiplied by graphics clock speed. Because both GPUs have the same number of TMUs, and the VisionTek XTASY 9600 256MB graphics card has higher operating frequency, it also has higher texture fillrate. Better texture fill rate means that the GPU can apply more textures and/or utilize more complex 3D effects for each textured picture element, which improves games visual appearance.

To speed up processing, the graphics cards store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the graphics card to run at higher display resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. Memory type, speed, and width of memory interface all affect the bandwidth value. Specifically, the VisionTek XTASY 9600 256MB GPU comes with wider memory bus. As a consequence, it has significantly higher memory bandwidth.