GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6790, which comes with core clock speeds of 840 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		47 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 103 Watts (219%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6790 will be 950% quicker than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (950%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 will be much (approximately 289%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24960 (289%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6790 is superior to the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM), by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9120 (211%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.