GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB vs Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 2GB

Intro

The GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB makes use of a 65/55 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 650 MHz. The GDDR3 memory runs at a speed of 900 MHz on this specific card. It features 96 SPUs as well as 48 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 2GB, which features a clock speed of 650 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 480 SPUs, 24 TAUs, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

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