GeForce 9600 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7770, which has GPU core speed of 1000 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1125 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7770		80 Watts
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		95 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (19%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7770 will be 25% faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		72000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 14400 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 will be a lot (about 92%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19200 (92%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7770 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (54%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.