GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7790, which comes with a clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GTS		75 Watts
Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (13%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7790 should theoretically be a lot better than the GeForce 8600 GTS in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (200%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 will be quite a bit (about 419%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 45200 (419%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 will be quite a bit (more or less 196%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce 8600 GTS, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10600 (196%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.