GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7770, which comes with a clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1125 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, 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 GSO 768MB		84 Watts
	Difference: 4 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7770 should in theory be a lot better than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		72000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 33600 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 will be much (more or less 52%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13600 (52%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 will be a lot (about 142%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9400 (142%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.