GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) vs Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)

Intro

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 RAM works at a speed of 800 MHz on this specific card. It features 160 SPUs as well as 8 TAUs and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		31 Watts
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		47 Watts
	Difference: 16 Watts (52%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same memory bandwidth, so in theory they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) is much (approximately 73%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM). (explain)

GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		8640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		5000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3640 (73%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) will be a lot (about 73%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM), and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		4320 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		2500 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1820 (73%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.