GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 vs Radeon R5 M255

Intro

The GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 uses a 80 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 540 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 700 MHz on this particular card. It features 32 SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R5 M255, which comes with GPU clock speed of 940 MHz, and 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also features 320 Stream Processors, 20 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory 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 is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher 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 most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock 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 output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.