GeForce 9400 GT 256MB vs GeForce GT 340

Intro

The GeForce 9400 GT 256MB makes use of a 65 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 550 MHz. The GDDR2 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 400 MHz on this specific card. It features 16 SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the GeForce GT 340, which features a GPU core clock speed of 550 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 850 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 96 SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that 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 amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.