GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6790, which has clock speeds of 840 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GTS		75 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6790 will be 320% faster than the GeForce 8600 GTS in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (320%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 will be much (about 211%) better at AF than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22800 (211%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 is much (more or less 149%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8600 GTS, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8040 (149%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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