GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7770, which features core speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		47 Watts
Radeon HD 7770		80 Watts
	Difference: 33 Watts (70%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7770, in theory, should perform much faster than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		72000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 59200 (463%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 will be quite a bit (more or less 363%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31360 (363%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 will be much (approximately 270%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM), and also capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11680 (270%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen 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 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.