GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs GeForce GTX 660 Ti

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce GTX 660 Ti, which makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 915 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this specific model. It features 1344 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 24 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		95 Watts
GeForce GTX 660 Ti		150 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (58%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 660 Ti should perform a lot faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		144000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 86400 (150%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti is much (about 393%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		102480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 81680 (393%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 660 Ti is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		21960 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11560 (111%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. 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 fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.