GeForce GT 230 vs GeForce GTX 590

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 590, which comes with a clock speed of 607 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 855 MHz. It also features a 384-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 512 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 48 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 230		65 Watts
GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 300 Watts (462%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 590 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 230 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
GeForce GT 230		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 289920 (755%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 will be quite a bit (about 783%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 230. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 230		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 68896 (783%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 590 is superior to the GeForce GT 230, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 230		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 53872 (1224%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.