GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3 vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R5 M230, which comes with core speeds of 780 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 320 SPUs as well as 20 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3 should be 40% quicker than the Radeon R5 M230 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3		22400 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R5 M230 will be quite a bit (more or less 81%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6960 (81%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3 is superior to the Radeon R5 M230, by far. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3		4320 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1200 (38%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.