GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 vs GeForce RTX 3090

Intro

The GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 makes use of a 80 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 540 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 700 MHz on this particular model. It features 32 SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the GeForce RTX 3090, which makes use of a 8 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 1395 MHz. The GDDR6X memory works at a speed of 1219 MHz on this model. It features 10496 SPUs along with 328 Texture Address Units and 112 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.