GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM), which features core speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 160 SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units 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

The GeForce 8600 GTS, in theory, should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8600 GTS is a lot (more or less 116%) more effective at anisotropic filtering 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

The GeForce 8600 GTS should be quite a bit (about 116%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM), and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

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