NVIDIA GeForce 6600 vs 6600 LE AGP

Pixel fillrate parameter determines how many pixels a graphics card can draw on screen and off screen. Higher numbers allow GPUs to support higher display resolutions and frame rates. There are two characteristics that affect the maximum theoretical pixel fillrate. These are graphics clock rate and the number of ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines). Since both characteristics are identical between graphics cards, their pixel fillrate is also equal.

Another important factor, that affects overall graphics card performance, is texture fillrate. This parameter is proportional to graphics clock rate and the number of TMUs (Texture Mapping Units). Because two graphics cards operate at the same frequency, and the NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GPU has twice as many Texture Mapping Units (TMUs), it has higher texture fillrate. Better maximum texture fill rate allows the graphics card to utilize more sophisticated 3D effects and/or map more textures to each textured picture element, which improves games visual appearance.

 

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 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, higher memory bandwidth of the NVIDIA GeForce 6600 is due to higher memory clock.