ATI Radeon HD 6670 vs NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT

Although it has lower graphics clock rate, the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT graphics card comes with better pixel fill rate, owing to twice as many Raster Operations Pipelines (ROPs). Having higher pixel fillrate allows the GPU to draw more pixels on screen and off screen, which is beneficial for some 3D effects in games, or when playing at higher display resolutions.

Even though its graphics clock is slower, the GeForce 9800 GT has many more Texture Mapping Units (TMUs), which results in significantly better texture fill rate. Having better maximum texture fill rate allows the card to apply more textures and/or utilize more complex 3D effects for each texel, which improves games visual appearance.

Maximum Single Precision performance illustrates how many single-precision floating point operations the graphics card can execute per second. The performance is expressed in billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second, or GFLOPS. As a rule, the faster CUDA cores or stream processors operate at, and the more cores / processors the GPU has, the higher Single Precision performance will be. The ATI Radeon HD 6670 graphics unit is considerably faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the graphics card will perform better in general computing applications. Since CUDA cores or stream processors are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

To speed up processing, the cards store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the GPU to run at higher screen resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. The bandwidth depends on memory type, speed, and width of memory interface. Specifically, the ATI Radeon HD 6670 comes with higher clocked memory of better kind. As such, it has higher memory bandwidth.