GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 vs GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB, which comes with clock speeds of 650 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 96 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		47 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		90 Watts
	Difference: 43 Watts (91%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB will be 350% quicker than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		57600 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 44800 (350%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB is quite a bit (about 261%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		31200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22560 (261%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB is quite a bit (approximately 141%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6080 (141%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR 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 number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.