GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) vs GeForce 9400 GT 256MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB, which makes use of a 65 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 550 MHz. The GDDR2 RAM works at a speed of 400 MHz on this particular card. It features 16 SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		47 Watts
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		50 Watts
	Difference: 3 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same memory bandwidth, so theoretically they should perform exactly the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) will be quite a bit (approximately 96%) better at AF than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		8640 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		4400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4240 (96%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) will be a lot (approximately 96%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		4320 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		2200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2120 (96%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.