GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs GeForce GT 340

Intro

The GeForce 9600 GT 1GB uses a 65/55 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 650 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 64 SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the GeForce GT 340, which has a clock frequency of 550 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 850 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 96 SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. 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 better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.