GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6990, which comes with clock speeds of 830 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		84 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 291 Watts (346%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6990 should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 281600 (733%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be quite a bit (more or less 504%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 132960 (504%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is superior to the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 46520 (705%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.