GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon R7 M265

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 M265, which has clock speeds of 725 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

Both cards have the exact same bandwidth, so in theory they should have the same performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M265 should be quite a bit (approximately 61%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon R7 M265		17400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6600 (61%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R7 M265 is superior to the GeForce 8600 GTS, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon R7 M265		5800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 400 (7%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.