GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB vs GeForce GTX 460 1GB

Intro

The GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB makes use of a 65/55 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 650 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 96 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 460 1GB, which has GPU clock speed of 675 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 336 SPUs, 56 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high 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 texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.