In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GT 720 v2 are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3.

The GT 720 has a 257 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the 8600 GT. This results in the GT 720 providing 4.2 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GT 720 has a 257 MHz higher core clock speed than the 8600 GT and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GT 720 providing 2.1 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GT 720 was released over three years more recently than the 8600 GT, and so the GT 720 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the 8600 GT when running the latest games.

The GT 720 has 512 MB more video memory than the 8600 GT, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GT 720 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GT 720 has 17.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the 8600 GT, which means that the memory performance of the GT 720 is slightly better than the 8600 GT.

The GeForce GT 720 v2 has 192 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 has 32. However, the actual shader performance of the GT 720 is 153 and the actual shader performance of the 8600 GT is 43. The GT 720 having 110 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GT 720 delivers a slightly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the 8600 GT.

The GT 720 transistor size technology is 52 nm (nanometers) smaller than the 8600 GT. This means that the GT 720 is expected to run massively cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the 8600 GT.

The GeForce GT 720 v2 requires 19 Watts to run and the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 requires 46 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the GT 720 and a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the 8600 GT. The 8600 GT requires 27 Watts more than the GT 720 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the 8600 GT to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the GT 720.