GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

The GeForce 9600 GT 1GB features a core clock frequency of 650 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 65/55 nm design. It is comprised of 64 SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which has a core clock speed of 625 MHz and a GDDR4 memory speed of 993 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It features 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill 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 reach the maximum fill rate.