GeForce 9600 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 5670

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5670, which has core clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 400(80x5) SPUs along with 20 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5670		61 Watts
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		95 Watts
	Difference: 34 Watts (56%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5670 should be 11% quicker than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5670		64000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GT 512MB will be a lot (more or less 34%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5670. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		20800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5670		15500 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5300 (34%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB is superior to the Radeon HD 5670, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5670		6200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4200 (68%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling 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 chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel 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 potential to get to the max fill rate.