GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6850, which comes with clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		84 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 43 Watts (51%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6850 should theoretically perform a lot faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 89600 (233%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be a lot (about 41%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10800 (41%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be a lot (approximately 276%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18200 (276%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.