GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 vs GeForce GTX 590

Intro

The GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 makes use of a 80 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 540 MHz. The GDDR3 memory works at a frequency of 700 MHz on this particular card. It features 32 SPUs along with 16 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 590, which features core clock speeds of 607 MHz on the GPU, and 855 MHz on the 1536 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 512 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 48 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.