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GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 makes use of a 80 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 540 MHz. The DDR2 RAM works at a frequency of 400 MHz on this particular card. It features 32 SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

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

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 47 Watts
Radeon HD 7970 250 Watts
Difference: 203 Watts (432%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7970 should in theory perform much faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970 264000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 12800 MB/sec
Difference: 251200 (1963%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be a lot (more or less 1270%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970 118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 8640 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 109760 (1270%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be quite a bit (about 585%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2, and capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970 29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 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

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GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2

Amazon.com

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Radeon HD 7970

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 Radeon HD 7970
Manufacturer nVidia AMD
Year April 2007 January 2012
Code Name G84 Tahiti XT
Memory 512 MB 3072 MB
Core Speed 540 MHz 925 MHz
Memory Speed 800 MHz 5500 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 47 watts 250 watts
Bandwidth 12800 MB/sec 264000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 8640 Mtexels/sec 118400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 4320 Mpixels/sec 29600 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 32 2048
Texture Mapping Units 16 128
Render Output Units 8 32
Bus Type DDR2 GDDR5
Bus Width 128-bit 384-bit
Fab Process 80 nm 28 nm
Transistors 289 million 4313 million
Bus PCIe x16 PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 10 DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.0 OpenGL 4.2

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high 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 number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.

Display Prices

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GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 7970

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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