In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GT 730 v3 Gigabyte 2GB Edition are noticeably better than the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT.

The GT 730 has a 160 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the GeForce 8600 GT. This results in the GT 730 providing 2.6 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 730 has a 160 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce 8600 GT, but the GeForce 8600 GT has 4 more Render Output Units than the GT 730. As a result, the GeForce 8600 GT exhibits a 1.5 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GT 730. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GT 730 was released over three years more recently than the GeForce 8600 GT, and so the GT 730 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the GeForce 8600 GT when running the latest games.

The GT 730 has 1792 MB more video memory than the GeForce 8600 GT, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GT 730 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GT 730 has 6.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GeForce 8600 GT, which means that the memory performance of the GT 730 is marginally better than the GeForce 8600 GT.

The GeForce GT 730 v3 Gigabyte 2GB Edition has 96 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce 8600 GT has 32. However, the actual shader performance of the GT 730 is 134 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce 8600 GT is 43. The GT 730 having 91 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GT 730 delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GeForce 8600 GT.

The GT 730 transistor size technology is 40 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GeForce 8600 GT. This means that the GT 730 is expected to run much cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GeForce 8600 GT.

The GeForce GT 730 v3 Gigabyte 2GB Edition requires 49 Watts to run and the GeForce 8600 GT requires 47 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the GT 730 and a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the GeForce 8600 GT. The GT 730 requires 2 Watts more than the GeForce 8600 GT to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GT 730 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the GeForce 8600 GT.