GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 4770

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4770, which features GPU clock speed of 750 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 800 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4770		80 Watts
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		95 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (19%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB is 13% quicker than the Radeon HD 4770 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4770		51200 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4770 should be just a bit (more or less 15%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4770		24000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (15%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4770 is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 4770		12000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.