GeForce 9600 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 5770

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5770, which has a clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 5770		108 Watts
	Difference: 13 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5770 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		76800 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5770 will be much (more or less 63%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		34000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13200 (63%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5770 is superior to the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		13600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (31%)

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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.