GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs GeForce GTX 480

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 480, which comes with clock speeds of 700 MHz on the GPU, and 924 MHz on the 1536 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 480 SPUs as well as 60 Texture Address Units and 48 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		95 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 155 Watts (163%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 480 should in theory be quite a bit better than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 119808 (208%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 is much (about 102%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21200 (102%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 480 is superior to the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23200 (223%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR 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 higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.