GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7870, which has a GPU core clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		90 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 85 Watts (94%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7870 should be 167% quicker than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (167%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be a lot (more or less 156%) better at AF than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48800 (156%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 is quite a bit (more or less 208%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21600 (208%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 amount of 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 higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.