GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon HD 4670 1GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4670 1GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 750 MHz. The GDDR4/GDDR3/DDR3/DDR2 RAM runs at a frequency of 1100 MHz on this particular model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4670 1GB		70 Watts
GeForce 8600 GTS		75 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (7%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4670 1GB, in theory, should be a small bit faster than the GeForce 8600 GTS overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4670 1GB		35200 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (10%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4670 1GB is much (approximately 122%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon HD 4670 1GB		24000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13200 (122%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4670 1GB is a better choice, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 4670 1GB		6000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 600 (11%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.