GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2 vs Radeon R7 240

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 240, which has core clock speeds of 730 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 memory. It features 320 SPUs along with 20 TAUs and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 240		30 Watts
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		47 Watts
	Difference: 17 Watts (57%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R7 240 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2 overall. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		28800 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (125%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 240 should be much (approximately 69%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		14600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5960 (69%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R7 240 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		5840 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1520 (35%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.