GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 vs Radeon HD 5570

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5570, which comes with GPU clock speed of 650 MHz, and 512 MB of DDR3 memory set to run at 900 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 400(80x5) Stream Processors, 20 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5570		43 Watts
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3		47 Watts
	Difference: 4 Watts (9%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5570 will be 29% quicker than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5570		28800 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3		22400 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (29%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5570 will be much (more or less 50%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3. (explain)

Radeon HD 5570		13000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4360 (50%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5570 should be a little bit (approximately 20%) more effective at AA than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 5570		5200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 880 (20%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.