GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 vs Radeon HD 5670

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5670, which comes with clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 400(80x5) SPUs along with 20 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3		47 Watts
Radeon HD 5670		61 Watts
	Difference: 14 Watts (30%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5670 is 186% quicker than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5670		64000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3		22400 MB/sec
	Difference: 41600 (186%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5670 will be much (about 79%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3. (explain)

Radeon HD 5670		15500 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6860 (79%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5670 is a lot (approximately 44%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5670		6200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1880 (44%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount 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 also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.