GeForce 8500 GT vs GeForce GT 440 3GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GT 440 3GB, which has clock speeds of 594 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 144 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8500 GT		45 Watts
GeForce GT 440 3GB		56 Watts
	Difference: 11 Watts (24%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GT 440 3GB should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8500 GT overall. (explain)

GeForce GT 440 3GB		43200 MB/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 30400 (238%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 440 3GB will be a lot (approximately 296%) better at AF than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10656 (296%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GT 440 3GB is superior to the GeForce 8500 GT, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12456 (692%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This 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 graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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 bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.