GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7970, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1375 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		47 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 203 Watts (432%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 should be a lot faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 251200 (1963%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be much (approximately 1270%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 109760 (1270%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be quite a bit (approximately 585%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25280 (585%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core 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 maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.