GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs GeForce 9800 GTX+

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce 9800 GTX+, which uses a 55 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 738 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM works at a speed of 1100 MHz on this specific card. It features 128 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		95 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX+		145 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (53%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ is 22% faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		70400 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (22%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ is a lot (about 127%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		47232 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26432 (127%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ should be a small bit (approximately 14%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB, and should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		11808 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1408 (14%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. 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 quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.