GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon HD 4550 256MB

Intro

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 uses a 65 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 550 MHz. The DDR2 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 500 MHz on this particular card. It features 96 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 12 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4550 256MB, which comes with GPU core speed of 600 MHz, and 256 MB of DDR3 RAM running at 800 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is comprised of 80(16x5) SPUs, 8 Texture Address Units, and 4 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.