Compare any two graphics cards:
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 vs Radeon HD 5970
IntroThe GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 makes use of a 80 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 540 MHz. The DDR2 memory works at a frequency of 400 MHz on this card. It features 32 SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5970, which comes with clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.
Display Graphs
Power Usage and Theoretical BenchmarksPower Consumption (Max TDP)
Memory BandwidthThe Radeon HD 5970 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 in general. (explain)
Texel RateThe Radeon HD 5970 should be much (about 2585%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2. (explain)
Pixel RateThe Radeon HD 5970 will be much (more or less 2048%) better at FSAA than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)
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
Display Prices
Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though. Specifications
Display Specifications
Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions. Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second. Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of 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.
Display Prices
Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.
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