GeForce 9600 GT 512MB vs GeForce GTX 570

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 570, which uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 732 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 950 MHz on this particular card. It features 480 SPUs along with 60 Texture Address Units and 40 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		95 Watts
GeForce GTX 570		219 Watts
	Difference: 124 Watts (131%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 570 should in theory be quite a bit better than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		152000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 94400 (164%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 will be a lot (more or less 111%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		43920 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23120 (111%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 570 is superior to the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		29280 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18880 (182%)

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 max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total 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 one second.

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