GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB 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 RAM works at a speed of 1050 MHz on this model. 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 768MB		84 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 66 Watts (79%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6790 should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (250%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 will be quite a bit (approximately 27%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (27%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing 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 768MB		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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.