GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 vs GeForce GTX Titan

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce GTX Titan, which makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 837 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1502 MHz on this particular card. It features 2688 SPUs as well as 224 Texture Address Units and 48 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		47 Watts
GeForce GTX Titan		250 Watts
	Difference: 203 Watts (432%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX Titan should in theory be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan		288384 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 275584 (2153%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX Titan is a lot (more or less 2070%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan		187488 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 178848 (2070%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX Titan is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan		40176 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 35856 (830%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.