GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB vs Radeon HD 4770

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4770, which has core clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640(128x5) SPUs as well as 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

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB should perform just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4770 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB is a lot (approximately 30%) faster with regards to 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

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4770 is superior to the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB, though not by far. (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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher 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 number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.