GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) 1GB, which features clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 480 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) 1GB		63 Watts
GeForce 8600 GTS		75 Watts
	Difference: 12 Watts (19%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) 1GB should perform a lot faster than the GeForce 8600 GTS overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) 1GB		64000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) 1GB should be a lot (approximately 78%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) 1GB		19200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8400 (78%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) 1GB is the winner, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) 1GB		6400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1000 (19%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.