GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6790, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 840 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1050 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 800 Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		47 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 103 Watts (219%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6790 should be a lot faster than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (950%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 is a lot (approximately 289%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24960 (289%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 will be quite a bit (about 211%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM), and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9120 (211%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.