GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2 vs Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM), which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 625 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM works at a speed of 800 MHz on this model. It features 160 SPUs as well as 8 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		31 Watts
GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2		47 Watts
	Difference: 16 Watts (52%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same memory bandwidth, so theoretically they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2 should be quite a bit (approximately 73%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM). (explain)

GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		5000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3640 (73%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2 should be much (approximately 73%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM), and able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		2500 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1820 (73%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.