GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM), which comes with GPU clock speed of 625 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM set to run at 800 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is made up of 160 Stream Processors, 8 TAUs, and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		31 Watts
GeForce 8600 GTS		75 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (142%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 8600 GTS will be 150% quicker than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (150%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8600 GTS will be quite a bit (about 116%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM). (explain)

GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		5000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5800 (116%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 8600 GTS is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		2500 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2900 (116%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

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