GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2 vs Radeon HD 6770 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6770 1GB, which has core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		47 Watts
Radeon HD 6770 1GB		108 Watts
	Difference: 61 Watts (130%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6770 1GB should in theory be a lot faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770 1GB		67200 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 54400 (425%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6770 1GB will be a lot (approximately 317%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770 1GB		36000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27360 (317%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6770 1GB is superior to the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770 1GB		14400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10080 (233%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.