GeForce 8600 GTS vs GeForce GTS 450

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce GTS 450, which comes with clock speeds of 783 MHz on the GPU, and 902 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 192 SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GTS		75 Watts
GeForce GTS 450		106 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (41%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTS 450 should be a lot faster than the GeForce 8600 GTS in general. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25728 (80%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 will be a lot (more or less 132%) better at AF than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14256 (132%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 will be much (approximately 132%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8600 GTS, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7128 (132%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum 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 better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at 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 the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.