GeForce 9600 GT 512MB vs GeForce 9800 GTX+

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce 9800 GTX+, which has a core clock speed of 738 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 1100 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It features 128 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		95 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX+		145 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (53%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ should theoretically be a lot superior to the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		70400 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (22%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ will be quite a bit (approximately 127%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		47232 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26432 (127%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ will be a bit (more or less 14%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		11808 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1408 (14%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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