GeForce 9600 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 4770

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4770, which features GPU clock speed of 750 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 800 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4770		80 Watts
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		95 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (19%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB should perform a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 4770 overall. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4770		51200 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4770 should be just a bit (about 15%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4770		24000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (15%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4770 is superior to the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 4770		12000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (15%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

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