In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce 7950 GT are marginally better than the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3.

The GeForce 7950 GT has a 10 MHz higher core clock speed and 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the 8600 GT. This results in the GeForce 7950 GT providing 4.6 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 GeForce 7950 GT has a 10 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Render Output Units than the 8600 GT. This results in the GeForce 7950 GT providing 8.9 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 8600 GT was released less than a year after the GeForce 7950 GT, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 and the GeForce 7950 GT have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The GeForce 7950 GT has 22.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the 8600 GT, which means that the memory performance of the GeForce 7950 GT is slightly better than the 8600 GT.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 has 32 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce 7950 GT has 24. However, the actual shader performance of the 8600 GT is 43 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce 7950 GT is 13. The 8600 GT having 30 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the GeForce 7950 GT performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The 8600 GT transistor size technology is 10 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GeForce 7950 GT. This means that the 8600 GT is expected to run very slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GeForce 7950 GT. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the 8600 GT should consume less power than the GeForce 7950 GT.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 requires 46 Watts to run and the GeForce 7950 GT requires 65 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the 8600 GT and a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the GeForce 7950 GT. The GeForce 7950 GT requires 19 Watts more than the 8600 GT to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GeForce 7950 GT to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the 8600 GT.