GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)

Intro

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 uses a 65 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 550 MHz. The DDR2 RAM is set to run 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 specifications to the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM), which features a GPU core clock speed of 650 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 850 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 336 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.