GeForce 8600 GTS vs GeForce GT 340

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce GT 340, which makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 550 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 850 MHz on this card. It features 96 SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GT 340 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 8600 GTS overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 340 will be a lot (approximately 63%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 8600 GTS is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 340		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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a 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 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs 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 rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.