GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) vs GeForce GT 420

Intro

The GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) comes with a GPU clock speed of 540 MHz, and the 256 MB of DDR2 RAM runs at 400 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 32 SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all of that to the GeForce GT 420, which comes with core speeds of 700 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 48 SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated 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 rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.