GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 vs Radeon HD 4770

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4770, which features a GPU core clock speed of 750 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 800 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 640(128x5) Stream Processors, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 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 4770		80 Watts
	Difference: 33 Watts (70%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4770 will be 300% quicker than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 4770		51200 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (300%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4770 should be a lot (about 178%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon HD 4770		24000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15360 (178%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4770 will be a lot (more or less 178%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 4770		12000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7680 (178%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.