GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which features clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 TAUs 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 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 166 Watts (198%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6970 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 137600 (358%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be much (about 220%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58080 (220%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be much (more or less 327%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21560 (327%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.