GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs GeForce GTX 460 SE

Intro

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 makes use of a 65 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 550 MHz. The DDR2 RAM runs at a frequency of 500 MHz on this particular card. It features 96 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 12 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 460 SE, which features a clock speed of 650 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 850 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 288 SPUs, 48 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.