GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) vs GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3, which has core clock speeds of 540 MHz on the GPU, and 700 MHz on the 256 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 32 SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3 should be a lot faster than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) in general. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3		22400 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 9600 (75%)

Texel Rate

Both cards have the exact same texel fill rate, so theoretically they should be equally good at at AF. (explain)

Pixel Rate

Both cards have the exact same pixel rate, so in theory they should be equally good at at full screen anti-aliasing, and be able to handle the same screen resolutions. (explain)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.