GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 6770

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6770, which makes use of a 40 nm design. ATi has clocked the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1050 MHz on this card. It features 800 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 6770		108 Watts
	Difference: 13 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6770, in theory, should perform a small bit faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770		67200 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 9600 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6770 will be quite a bit (approximately 73%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770		36000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15200 (73%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6770 is quite a bit (more or less 38%) more effective at AA than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770		14400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (38%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per 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 better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 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 get to the max fill rate.