GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6790, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 840 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1050 MHz on this specific card. It features 800 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		84 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 66 Watts (79%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6790 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (250%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 is a lot (approximately 27%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (27%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 should be a lot (approximately 104%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB, and able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.