In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition are massively better than the Nvidia GeForce GT 440 Gigabyte Turbo Cache 1GB Edition.

The GT 440 has a 180 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 470, but the GTX 470 has 40 more Texture Mapping Units than the GT 440. As a result, the GTX 470 exhibits a 23.1 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GT 440. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GT 440 has a 180 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 470, but the GTX 470 has 36 more Render Output Units than the GT 440. As a result, the GTX 470 exhibits a 22.7 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GT 440. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GT 440 was released less than a year after the GTX 470, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The GTX 470 has 256 MB more video memory than the GT 440, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GTX 470 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX 470 has 84.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GT 440, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 470 is much better than the GT 440.

The GeForce GT 440 Gigabyte Turbo Cache 1GB Edition has 96 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition has 448. However, the actual shader performance of the GT 440 is 159 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 470 is 582. The GTX 470 having 423 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 470 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GT 440.

The GeForce GT 440 Gigabyte Turbo Cache 1GB Edition requires 65 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition requires 215 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the GT 440 and a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GTX 470. The GTX 470 requires 150 Watts more than the GT 440 to run. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 470 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GT 440.