GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6990, which features GPU core speed of 830 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		47 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 328 Watts (698%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6990 should theoretically be much faster than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 307200 (2400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be quite a bit (approximately 1744%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 150720 (1744%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 48800 (1130%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.