GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB vs Radeon HD 4770

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4770, which comes with core speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640(128x5) SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4770		80 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		90 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (13%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB, in theory, should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 4770 overall. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		57600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4770		51200 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (13%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB will be much (approximately 30%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 4770. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		31200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4770		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (30%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4770 is superior to the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 4770		12000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (15%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and high 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 amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per 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 - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.