In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce 6800 GT.

The 8600 GT has a 190 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the GeForce 6800 GT. This results in the 8600 GT providing 3 GTexel/s better texturing performance. Neither of these GPUs support DirectX 10 or higher, so Texture Rate holds more weight than when comparing more modern GPUs.

The 8600 GT has a 190 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce 6800 GT, but the GeForce 6800 GT has 8 more Render Output Units than the 8600 GT. As a result, the GeForce 6800 GT exhibits a 1.3 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the 8600 GT. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The 8600 GT was released over a year more recently than the GeForce 6800 GT, and so the 8600 GT is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GeForce 6800 GT.

The 8600 GT has 256 MB more video memory than the GeForce 6800 GT, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, the overall memory performance is about the same.

The GeForce 6800 GT has 9.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the 8600 GT, which means that the memory performance of the GeForce 6800 GT is marginally better than the 8600 GT.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 has 32 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce 6800 GT has 16. However, the actual shader performance of the 8600 GT is 43 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce 6800 GT is 6. The 8600 GT having 37 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the GeForce 6800 GT performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The 8600 GT transistor size technology is 50 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GeForce 6800 GT. This means that the 8600 GT is expected to run much cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GeForce 6800 GT.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 requires 46 Watts to run and the GeForce 6800 GT requires 67 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the 8600 GT. The GeForce 6800 GT requires 21 Watts more than the 8600 GT to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GeForce 6800 GT to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the 8600 GT.