GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6870, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1050 MHz on this particular card. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		84 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 67 Watts (80%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6870 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (250%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 will be much (about 91%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24000 (91%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22200 (336%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.