GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2 vs GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB, which features clock speeds of 550 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 768 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 96 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 12 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		47 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		84 Watts
	Difference: 37 Watts (79%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB should theoretically be much better than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2 overall. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		38400 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (200%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB should be quite a bit (more or less 206%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17760 (206%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		6600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2280 (53%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.