GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs GeForce GTX 470

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 470, which makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 607 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 837 MHz on this card. It features 448 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 40 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		95 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 120 Watts (126%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 470 should in theory perform a lot faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 76320 (133%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 will be a lot (about 63%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13192 (63%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 will be quite a bit (about 133%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13880 (133%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.