GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7990, which comes with core speeds of 950 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GTS		75 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 300 Watts (400%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7990 is 1700% quicker than the GeForce 8600 GTS overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 544000 (1700%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 should be quite a bit (more or less 2152%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 232400 (2152%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 55400 (1026%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.