GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs GeForce GTS 450

Intro

The GeForce 9600 GT 1GB has a core clock speed of 650 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 65/55 nm design. It is comprised of 64 SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all that to the GeForce GTS 450, which comes with GPU clock speed of 783 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 902 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 192 Stream Processors, 32 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.