ATI Radeon 9600 vs PowerColor Radeon 9250 128MB PCI (R9250 128MB PCI)

Since both cards have the same number of ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines), and the Radeon 9600 graphics unit operates at higher frequency, it also has higher pixel fillrate. Having better pixel fillrate allows the card to draw more pixels on screen and off screen, which is beneficial for some 3D effects in games, or when playing at higher display resolutions.

Another important parameter, that affects overall graphics card performance, is texture fillrate. This parameter is proportional to the number of TMUs and graphics clock rate. Because two GPUs have the same number of Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) and the ATI Radeon 9600 graphics card is clocked higher, its texture fillrate is higher. Better texture fill rate means that the GPU can map more textures and/or utilize more complex 3D effects for each texel, which improves visual appearance of games and generated images.

Memory bandwidth parameter tells how much memory (in Gigabytes) the graphics card can read from or write to dedicated memory per second. Cards with higher memory bandwidth have better performance at high display resolutions, or when using large and detailed textures, and/or utilizing complex 3D effects and filters, like anti-aliasing. Memory type, speed, and width of memory interface all affect the bandwidth value. Specifically, the Radeon 9600 offers wider memory bus. As a result, it has more memory bandwidth.