GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 vs Radeon R7 250

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 250, which features clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1150 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		47 Watts
Radeon R7 250		65 Watts
	Difference: 18 Watts (38%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R7 250 should be much faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 overall. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		73600 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 60800 (475%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 250 is a lot (more or less 178%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		24000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15360 (178%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R7 250 is superior to the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		8000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen 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 number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.