GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon HD 6670 (OEM)

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6670 (OEM), which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 480 Stream Processors, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6670 (OEM)		63 Watts
GeForce 8600 GTS		75 Watts
	Difference: 12 Watts (19%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 8600 GTS overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6670 (OEM)		64000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) is a lot (about 78%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon HD 6670 (OEM)		19200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8400 (78%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) is a bit (approximately 19%) better at AA than the GeForce 8600 GTS, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6670 (OEM)		6400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1000 (19%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.