GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs GeForce GT 440 1.5GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GT 440 1.5GB, which uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 594 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 900 MHz on this specific card. It features 144 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 24 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		56 Watts
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		95 Watts
	Difference: 39 Watts (70%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 9600 GT 1GB should in theory be much faster than the GeForce GT 440 1.5GB overall. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		43200 MB/sec
	Difference: 14400 (33%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GT 1GB is much (approximately 46%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 440 1.5GB. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		14256 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6544 (46%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GT 440 1.5GB is superior to the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		14256 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3856 (37%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.