GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7850, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 860 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this particular card. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		84 Watts
Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
	Difference: 46 Watts (55%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7850 should be 300% faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 115200 (300%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is a lot (more or less 108%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28640 (108%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is superior to the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20920 (317%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.