GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 5770

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5770, which features GPU clock speed of 850 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1200 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 5770		108 Watts
	Difference: 13 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5770 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		76800 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5770 will be a lot (about 63%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		34000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13200 (63%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5770 is a lot (approximately 31%) better at FSAA than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		13600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (31%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.