GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6970, which has a clock frequency of 880 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		47 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 203 Watts (432%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6970 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 163200 (1275%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be much (about 878%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 75840 (878%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM), by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23840 (552%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.