GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB vs GeForce GT 340

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GT 340, which uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 550 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 850 MHz on this particular card. It features 96 SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 340		69 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		84 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (22%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GT 340 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GT 340		54400 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (42%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB will be a lot (more or less 50%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 340. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 340		17600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8800 (50%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB is superior to the GeForce GT 340, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		6600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 340		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2200 (50%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card 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 card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.