GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB vs Radeon HD 5770

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5770, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this specific card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		84 Watts
Radeon HD 5770		108 Watts
	Difference: 24 Watts (29%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5770 will be 100% faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		76800 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5770 will be a lot (about 29%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		34000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7600 (29%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5770 is quite a bit (more or less 106%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		13600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7000 (106%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.