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GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 features a GPU core clock speed of 550 MHz, and the 512 MB of DDR2 RAM runs at 500 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 96 Stream Processors, 48 Texture Address Units, and 12 ROPs.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6950, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular model. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		84 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 116 Watts (138%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 should in theory perform much faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 144000 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be a lot (approximately 167%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44000 (167%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is superior to the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19000 (288%)

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

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GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512

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Radeon HD 6950

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Specifications

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Model	GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512	Radeon HD 6950
Manufacturer	nVidia	AMD
Year	September 2008	December 2010
Code Name	G92	Cayman Pro
Memory	512 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	550 MHz	800 MHz
Memory Speed	1000 MHz	5000 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	84 watts	200 watts
Bandwidth	16000 MB/sec	160000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	26400 Mtexels/sec	70400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	6600 Mpixels/sec	25600 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	96	1408
Texture Mapping Units	48	88
Render Output Units	12	32
Bus Type	DDR2	GDDR5
Bus Width	128-bit	256-bit
Fab Process	65 nm	40 nm
Transistors	754 million	2640 million
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe x16
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 4.1

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a 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 - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.

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