GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon R7 M260

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 M260, which comes with core clock speeds of 715 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 memory. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 8600 GTS should perform a lot faster than the Radeon R7 M260 in general. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M260		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260 will be much (more or less 59%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		17160 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6360 (59%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R7 M260 is a better choice, but only just. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		5720 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 320 (6%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per 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. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.