GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon HD 6670 (OEM)

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6670 (OEM), which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this model. It features 480 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

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

In theory, the Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) will be 100% quicker than the GeForce 8600 GTS in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (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 quite a bit (approximately 78%) faster with regards to 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

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) is superior to the GeForce 8600 GTS, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.