GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB vs GeForce GT 430 1GB

Intro

The GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB makes use of a 65 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 550 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 800 MHz on this particular card. It features 96 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 12 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the GeForce GT 430 1GB, which comes with core clock speeds of 700 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 96 SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.