GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6790, which has a core clock frequency of 840 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1050 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 800 SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		84 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 66 Watts (79%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6790 is 740% faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 118400 (740%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 will be much (more or less 27%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (27%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6790 is superior to the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6840 (104%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.