GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 vs GeForce GTX 650 Ti

Intro

The GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 features a core clock speed of 540 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 700 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 80 nm design. It is made up of 32 SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 650 Ti, which comes with core speeds of 928 MHz on the GPU, and 1350 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 768 SPUs as well as 64 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.