GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6790, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 840 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1050 MHz on this card. 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 GT 512MB DDR2		47 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 103 Watts (219%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6790 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (950%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 is quite a bit (more or less 289%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24960 (289%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 will be much (about 211%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		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 largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.