GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 vs Radeon R7 360

Intro

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 makes use of a 80 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 540 MHz. The DDR2 memory is set to run at a frequency of 400 MHz on this specific model. It features 32 SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 360, which features a core clock speed of 1050 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1625 MHz. It also features a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 768 SPUs, 48 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should 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, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the 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 clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.