GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) vs Radeon R7 250

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 250, which features a clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1150 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 384 SPUs, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		47 Watts
Radeon R7 250		65 Watts
	Difference: 18 Watts (38%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R7 250 is 475% quicker than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		73600 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 60800 (475%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 250 should be quite a bit (more or less 178%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM). (explain)

Radeon R7 250		24000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15360 (178%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 250 will be quite a bit (approximately 85%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM), and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		8000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3680 (85%)

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 max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.