Introduction
Let's take a look at how the GeForce 9600 GT compares against its predecessors and a selection of other NVIDIA graphics cards.
GeForce 8800 GT |
GeForce 9600 GT |
GeForce 8600 GTS |
GeForce 8600 GT |
GeForce 7600 GT |
|
Architecture |
G92 |
G94 |
G84 |
G84 |
G73 |
Manufacturing Process |
65 nm |
65 nm |
80 nm |
80 nm |
90 nm |
Transistor Count |
754 Million |
754 Million |
289 Million |
289 Million |
177 Million |
DirectX Support |
10 |
10 |
10 |
10 |
9.0c |
Interface |
PCI Express 2.0 |
PCI Express 2.0 |
PCI Express |
PCI Express |
PCI Express |
Stream
Processors |
112 |
64 |
32 |
32 |
12 Pixel & 5 Vertex Shaders |
Vertex
Shader Version |
4.0 |
4.0 |
4.0 |
4.0 |
3.0 |
Pixel
Shader Version |
4.0 |
4.0 |
4.0 |
4.0 |
3.0 |
ROPs |
16 |
16 |
8 |
8 |
8 |
Core
Speed |
600 MHz |
650 MHz |
675 MHz |
540 MHz |
560 MHz |
Fill
Rate |
33,600 MTexels/s |
20,800 MTexels/s |
10,800 MTexels/s |
8,640 MTexels/s |
6,720 MTexels/s |
Memory
Bus Width |
256-bits |
256-bits |
128-bits |
128-bits |
128-bits |
Memory
Type |
GDDR3 |
GDDR3 |
GDDR3 |
GDDR3 |
GDDR3 |
Memory
Speed |
900 MHz |
900 MHz |
1000 MHz |
700 MHz |
700 MHz |
Memory
Bandwidth |
57.6 GB/s |
57.6 GB/s |
32.0 GB/s |
22.4 GB/s |
22.4 GB/s |
Right off the bat, you can see that the GeForce 9600 GT offers a tremendous boost in performance over its rather weak predecessor, the GeForce 8600 GT. The GeForce 9600 GT has twice as many stream processors and run at a higher clock speed. This allows it to deliver a 2.4X higher fillrate than the the GeForce 8600 GT. Even its memory bandwidth is significantly (2.57X) higher, thanks to the much wider memery bus used and the faster memory clock.
It is also much faster than the GeForce 8600 GTS, which is the higher-clocked version of the GeForce 8600 GT. Compared to that card, the GeForce 9600 GT has almost twice the fillrate and memory bandwidth even though the GeForce 8600 GTS's core and memory clocks are actually faster.
New Silicon
The NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT is based on the new NVIDIA G94 GPU. This is basically a cut-down version fo the G92 GPU which also uses the same 65 nm process technology. This allows NVIDIA to produce a smaller and cheaper version of the G92 with just 64 stream processors. This is what the G94 GPU looks like.