GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6990, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 830 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this specific card. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 280 Watts (295%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 should be 456% faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 262400 (456%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is much (more or less 666%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 138560 (666%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 42720 (411%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.