GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6850, which features a core clock speed of 775 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 960 SPUs, 48 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		84 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 43 Watts (51%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6850 should theoretically be much superior to the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 89600 (233%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be a lot (approximately 41%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10800 (41%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18200 (276%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.