GeForce 8600 GTS vs GeForce GT 340 1GB

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce GT 340 1GB, which comes with clock speeds of 550 MHz on the GPU, and 850 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 96 SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 340 1GB		69 Watts
GeForce 8600 GTS		75 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (9%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GT 340 1GB should in theory be a lot better than the GeForce 8600 GTS overall. (explain)

GeForce GT 340 1GB		54400 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 22400 (70%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 340 1GB will be quite a bit (approximately 63%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

GeForce GT 340 1GB		17600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6800 (63%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 8600 GTS will be a lot (more or less 23%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 340 1GB, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 340 1GB		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1000 (23%)

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 transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

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