GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 1600 SPUs as well as 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2		47 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 247 Watts (526%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5970 is 1900% quicker than the GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2 overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 243200 (1900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (about 2585%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 223360 (2585%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 88480 (2048%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per 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 video 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.