GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7790, which features a clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also features 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)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		95 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (12%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7790 is 67% faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (67%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 will be a lot (about 169%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35200 (169%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 will be quite a bit (about 54%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB, and also able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (54%)

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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at 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 video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs 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 rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.