GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 vs Radeon HD 4350

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4350, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 575 MHz. The DDR2 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 500 MHz on this card. It features 80(16x5) SPUs as well as 8 TAUs and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4350		22 Watts
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		47 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (114%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon HD 4350 in general. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4350		8000 MB/sec
	Difference: 4800 (60%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 is quite a bit (about 88%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4350. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4350		4600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4040 (88%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4350		2300 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2020 (88%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.