GeForce 8500 GT vs Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 650 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM runs at a speed of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 480 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8500 GT		45 Watts
Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB		50 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (11%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB should perform much faster than the GeForce 8500 GT overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB		28800 MB/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (125%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB is a lot (approximately 333%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB		15600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12000 (333%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB is superior to the GeForce 8500 GT, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB		5200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3400 (189%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, 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 figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock 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 rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.