In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GT 220 v3 are marginally better than the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3.

The GT 220 has a 75 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the 8600 GT. This results in the GT 220 providing 1.2 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 220 has a 75 MHz higher core clock speed than the 8600 GT and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GT 220 providing 0.6 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 220 was released over a year more recently than the 8600 GT, and so the GT 220 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the 8600 GT.

The GeForce GT 220 v3 and the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The GT 220 has 9.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the 8600 GT, which means that the memory performance of the GT 220 is marginally better than the 8600 GT.

The GeForce GT 220 v3 has 48 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 has 32. However, the actual shader performance of the GT 220 is 59 and the actual shader performance of the 8600 GT is 43. The GT 220 having 16 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GT 220 delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the 8600 GT.

The GT 220 transistor size technology is 40 nm (nanometers) smaller than the 8600 GT. This means that the GT 220 is expected to run much cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the 8600 GT. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the GT 220 should consume less power than the 8600 GT.

The GeForce GT 220 v3 requires 58 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 220 and a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the 8600 GT. The GT 220 requires 12 Watts more than the 8600 GT to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GT 220 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the 8600 GT.