GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6790, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 840 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1050 MHz on this model. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		84 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 66 Watts (79%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6790 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (250%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 is quite a bit (approximately 27%) better at AF than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (27%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 is much (approximately 104%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB, and will be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface 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 higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write 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 card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.