GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB vs Radeon HD 4770

Intro

The GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB uses a 65/55 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 650 MHz. The GDDR3 memory works at a speed of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 96 SPUs along with 48 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4770, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 800 MHz on this card. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.