GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB vs GeForce GTX 470

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 470, which features core speeds of 607 MHz on the GPU, and 837 MHz on the 1280 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 448 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 40 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		84 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 131 Watts (156%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 470 should in theory be much better than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 95520 (249%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 will be much (more or less 29%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7592 (29%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 470 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17680 (268%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.