GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with core speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		84 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 67 Watts (80%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6870 should in theory perform a lot faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (250%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 is quite a bit (more or less 91%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24000 (91%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

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