GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) vs Radeon HD 4650 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4650 512MB, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 600 MHz, and 512 MB of DDR2 memory set to run at 500 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 320(64x5) SPUs, 32 TAUs, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		47 Watts
Radeon HD 4650 512MB		55 Watts
	Difference: 8 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 4650 512MB should in theory be a lot superior to the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4650 512MB		16000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4650 512MB will be much (about 122%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 4650 512MB		19200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10560 (122%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4650 512MB is superior to the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM), though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon HD 4650 512MB		4800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 480 (11%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also 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 maximum fill rate.