GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7870, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1200 MHz on this specific model. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		47 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 128 Watts (272%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7870 should be 1100% quicker than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 140800 (1100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be quite a bit (approximately 826%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 71360 (826%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 27680 (641%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.