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GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

The GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB uses a 65/55 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 650 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 900 MHz on this card. It features 96 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, which has a GPU core clock speed of 668 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR3 RAM set to run at 828 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB 75 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB 90 Watts
Difference: 15 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB should in theory be a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB 57600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB 52992 MB/sec
Difference: 4608 (9%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB is quite a bit (about 192%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB 31200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB 10688 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 20512 (192%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 1GB is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB 10688 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB 10400 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 288 (3%)

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

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GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB

Amazon.com

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Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB Radeon HD 3850 1GB
Manufacturer nVidia AMD
Year October 2008 Nov 19, 2007
Code Name G94a/b RV670 PRO
Memory 512 MB 1024 MB
Core Speed 650 MHz 668 MHz
Memory Speed 1800 MHz 1656 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 90 watts 75 watts
Bandwidth 57600 MB/sec 52992 MB/sec
Texel Rate 31200 Mtexels/sec 10688 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 10400 Mpixels/sec 10688 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 96 320(64x5)
Texture Mapping Units 48 16
Render Output Units 16 16
Bus Type GDDR3 GDDR3
Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 65/55 nm 55 nm
Transistors 505 million (Unknown) million
Bus PCIe x16 2.0 PCIe 2.0 x16/AGP 8x
DirectX Version DirectX 10 DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.0 OpenGL 3.0

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.

Display Prices

Hide Prices

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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