GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB vs Radeon HD 6670 (OEM)

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6670 (OEM), which comes with a core clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 480 SPUs, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6670 (OEM)		63 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		84 Watts
	Difference: 21 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6670 (OEM)		64000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (67%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB is quite a bit (more or less 38%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6670 (OEM). (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6670 (OEM)		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (38%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB is a better choice, but only just. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		6600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6670 (OEM)		6400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 200 (3%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out 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 is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.