GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB vs Radeon HD 4770

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4770, which comes with clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 TAUs 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 GSO 512MB		90 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (13%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB will be 13% faster than the Radeon HD 4770 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB should be much (more or less 30%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4770. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		31200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4770		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (30%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4770 is a bit (approximately 15%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 4770		12000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's 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 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 video 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 maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock 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 also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.