GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2 vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

The GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2 makes use of a 80 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 540 MHz. The DDR2 RAM is set to run at a speed of 400 MHz on this particular card. It features 32 SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7770, which has clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out 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 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 maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 also depends 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.