GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB vs Radeon HD 4670 512MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4670 512MB, which has a GPU core clock speed of 750 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR4/GDDR3/DDR3/DDR2 memory set to run at 1000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4670 512MB		70 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		84 Watts
	Difference: 14 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB should in theory be a little bit superior to the Radeon HD 4670 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		38400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4670 512MB		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB will be a little bit (about 10%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4670 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4670 512MB		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (10%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB is superior to the Radeon HD 4670 512MB, though only just barely. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		6600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4670 512MB		6000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 600 (10%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.