GeForce 8500 GT vs GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512, which comes with clock speeds of 550 MHz on the GPU, and 500 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR2 RAM. It features 96 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 12 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8500 GT		45 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		84 Watts
	Difference: 39 Watts (87%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 should in theory be much better than the GeForce 8500 GT overall. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		16000 MB/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 is much (about 633%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22800 (633%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 should be much (about 267%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8500 GT, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		6600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (267%)

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 in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.