ELSA GLADIAC 979 GX2 1GB vs NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT

Because it has 4 times as many ROPs, the ELSA GLADIAC 979 GX2 1GB graphics unit provides significantly higher pixel fill rate, even though its graphics frequency is lower. Having better 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 it has slower graphics clock, the ELSA GLADIAC 979 GX2 1GB card comes with 3 times as many Texture Mapping Units (TMUs), resulting in substantially better texture fill rate. Having better maximum texture fill rate allows the GPU to use more complex 3D effects and/or apply more textures to each textured picture element, which improves visual appearance of games and generated images.

Memory bandwidth parameter specifies how much memory (in Gigabytes) the graphics card can read from or write to dedicated memory per second. Cards with higher memory bandwidth have better performance at high display resolutions, or when using large and detailed textures, and/or utilizing complex 3D effects and filters, like anti-aliasing. The bandwidth is dependent on memory type, speed, and memory interface width. Specifically, the GLADIAC 979 GX2 1GB graphics card has wider memory bus. As a consequence, it has more memory bandwidth.