In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GT 610 v2.

The GT 610 has a 10 MHz higher core clock speed than the 8600 GT, but the 8600 GT has 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the GT 610. As a result, the 8600 GT exhibits a 4.2 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GT 610. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GT 610 has a 10 MHz higher core clock speed than the 8600 GT, but the 8600 GT has 4 more Render Output Units than the GT 610. As a result, the 8600 GT exhibits a 2.1 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GT 610. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GT 610 was released over three years more recently than the 8600 GT, and so the GT 610 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 610 has 512 MB more video memory than the 8600 GT, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, overall, the 8600 GT has superior memory performance.

The 8600 GT has 14.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GT 610, which means that the memory performance of the 8600 GT is slightly better than the GT 610.

The GeForce GT 610 v2 has 48 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 has 32. However, the actual shader performance of the GT 610 is 53 and the actual shader performance of the 8600 GT is 43. The GT 610 having 10 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the 8600 GT performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GT 610 transistor size technology is 52 nm (nanometers) smaller than the 8600 GT. This means that the GT 610 is expected to run massively cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the 8600 GT.

The GeForce GT 610 v2 requires 29 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 610 and a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the 8600 GT. The 8600 GT requires 17 Watts more than the GT 610 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 610.