GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 925 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1375 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		47 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 203 Watts (432%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7970 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 251200 (1963%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be quite a bit (more or less 1270%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 109760 (1270%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25280 (585%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.