GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) vs GeForce GTX 570

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce GTX 570, which makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 732 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 950 MHz on this specific model. It features 480 SPUs as well as 60 Texture Address Units and 40 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		47 Watts
GeForce GTX 570		219 Watts
	Difference: 172 Watts (366%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 570 should be much faster than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		152000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 139200 (1088%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 will be a lot (about 408%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM). (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		43920 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35280 (408%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 570 is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		29280 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24960 (578%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can 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 core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant 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.