GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7970, which features a core clock frequency of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 155 Watts (163%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7970 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 206400 (358%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is a lot (more or less 469%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 97600 (469%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19200 (185%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 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, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.