GeForce 8500 GT vs Geforce GTX 680

Intro

Compare those specs to the Geforce GTX 680, which makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 1006 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1502 MHz on this card. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8500 GT		45 Watts
Geforce GTX 680		195 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (333%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Geforce GTX 680 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 8500 GT overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		192256 MB/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 179456 (1402%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 will be a lot (more or less 3477%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		128768 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 125168 (3477%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 680 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		32192 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 30392 (1688%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.