ATI Radeon HD 4670 vs Axle3D GeForce 9600GSO 384M DDR3 192bits

The GeForce 9600GSO 384M DDR3 192bits GPU has better pixel fill rate due to greater number of Raster Operations Pipelines (ROPs), even though its graphics clock is lower. Having higher pixel fillrate allows the card 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 it has slower graphics clock rate, the GeForce 9600GSO 384M DDR3 192bits GPU comes with many more Texture Mapping Units (TMUs), resulting in better texture fill rate. Better texture fill rate means that the card can apply more textures and/or utilize more complex 3D effects for each texel, which improves visual appearance of games and generated images.

Maximum Single Precision performance, measured in GFLOPS or billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second, shows how fast the graphics card is at running programs, that process mainly single-precision floating point data. Generally, the faster CUDA cores or stream processors operate at, and the more cores / processors the graphics card has, the higher Single Precision performance will be. The ATI Radeon HD 4670 is significantly faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the GPU 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 GPUs 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 graphics card to run at higher screen resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. The bandwidth is dependent on a few components, like memory type, speed, and width of memory interface. Specifically, higher memory bandwidth of the GeForce 9600GSO 384M DDR3 192bits is due to wider memory bus.