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GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

The GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) comes with core clock speeds of 540 MHz on the GPU, and 400 MHz on the 256 MB of DDR2 RAM. It features 32 SPUs as well as 16 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6790, which features a GPU core clock speed of 840 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1050 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800 Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

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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

In theory, the Radeon HD 6790 should perform 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 (more or less 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 should be much (approximately 211%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM), and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (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

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GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)

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Radeon HD 6790

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Specifications

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Model	GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)	Radeon HD 6790
Manufacturer	nVidia	AMD
Year	April 2007	April 2011
Code Name	G84	Barts LE
Memory	256 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	540 MHz	840 MHz
Memory Speed	800 MHz	4200 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	47 watts	150 watts
Bandwidth	12800 MB/sec	134400 MB/sec
Texel Rate	8640 Mtexels/sec	33600 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	4320 Mpixels/sec	13440 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	32	800
Texture Mapping Units	16	40
Render Output Units	8	16
Bus Type	DDR2	GDDR5
Bus Width	128-bit	256-bit
Fab Process	80 nm	40 nm
Transistors	289 million	1700 million
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 2.1 x16
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 4.1

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must 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 AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.

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