GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2 vs Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)

Intro

The GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2 makes use of a 80 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 540 MHz. The DDR2 RAM is set to run at a speed of 400 MHz on this particular model. It features 32 SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM), which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 625 MHz. The GDDR3 memory runs at a speed of 800 MHz on this particular model. It features 160 SPUs as well as 8 TAUs and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR 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 calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling 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 the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.