GeForce 8800 GS vs GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB, which has GPU clock speed of 550 MHz, and 1536 MB of GDDR3 memory set to run at 800 MHz through a 192-bit bus. It also is made up of 96 Stream Processors, 48 TAUs, and 12 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		84 Watts
GeForce 8800 GS		105 Watts
	Difference: 21 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same memory bandwidth, so in theory they should perform exactly the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

Both cards have the exact same texel rate, so theoretically they should perform equally good at at anisotropic filtering. (explain)

Pixel Rate

Both cards have exactly the same pixel fill rate, so in theory they should be equally good at at anti-aliasing, and be capable of handling the same screen resolutions. (explain)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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 applied in one second. This number is worked out 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.