GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7970, which has a core clock speed of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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 be quite a bit 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 should be quite a bit (approximately 469%) faster with regards to AF 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

The Radeon HD 7970 is a lot (approximately 185%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling 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 its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core 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 fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.