GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6790, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 840 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1050 MHz on this model. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		84 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 66 Watts (79%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6790 should theoretically be much faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 118400 (740%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 will be much (approximately 27%) better at AF than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (27%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6790 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6840 (104%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.