GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6790, which comes with core speeds of 840 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

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 quite a bit 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 is quite a bit (more or less 27%) more effective at texture filtering 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 using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6790 is a better choice, 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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 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 applied in one second.

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