GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6850, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this model. It features 960 SPUs as well as 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

The Radeon HD 6850 should in theory be a lot faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be much (more or less 41%) faster with regards to anisotropic 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 running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is superior to the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB, 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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.