GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon HD 4670 1GB

Intro

The GeForce 8600 GTS features a GPU core speed of 675 MHz, and the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory runs at 1000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 32 Stream Processors, 16 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4670 1GB, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 750 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR4/GDDR3/DDR3/DDR2 memory set to run at 1100 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 32 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its 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 clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.