GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon HD 4650 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4650 512MB, which comes with a core clock frequency of 600 MHz and a DDR2 memory speed of 500 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is made up of 320(64x5) SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4650 512MB		55 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		84 Watts
	Difference: 29 Watts (53%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same memory bandwidth, so theoretically they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 is much (approximately 38%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4650 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4650 512MB		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (38%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		6600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4650 512MB		4800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1800 (38%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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 max fill rate.