Compare any two graphics cards:

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB

Intro

The GeForce 9600 GT 1GB has a core clock frequency of 650 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 65/55 nm design. It features 64 SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, which comes with a clock speed of 625 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 993 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		250 Watts
	Difference: 155 Watts (163%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 69504 (121%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB is a lot (approximately 140%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29200 (140%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (92%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

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GeForce 9600 GT 1GB

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Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB

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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 GT 1GB	Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB
Manufacturer	nVidia	AMD
Year	Feb 2008	Nov 7, 2008
Code Name	G94a/b	R700
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB (x2)
Core Speed	650 MHz	625 MHz (x2)
Memory Speed	1800 MHz	1986 MHz (x2)
Power (Max TDP)	95 watts	250 watts
Bandwidth	57600 MB/sec	127104 MB/sec
Texel Rate	20800 Mtexels/sec	50000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	10400 Mpixels/sec	20000 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	64	800(160x5) (x2)
Texture Mapping Units	32	40 (x2)
Render Output Units	16	16 (x2)
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR3
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit (x2)
Fab Process	65/55 nm	55 nm
Transistors	505 million	956 million
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe 2.0 x16 (PCIe bridge)
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 3.0

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over 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, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one 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 - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on 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 ability to reach the max fill rate.

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