GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon R9 M265X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M265X, which comes with clock speeds of 575 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 M265X should in theory be much better than the GeForce 8600 GTS overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M265X		72000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 40000 (125%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M265X will be quite a bit (about 113%) better at AF than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon R9 M265X		23000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12200 (113%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M265X should be a lot (more or less 70%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8600 GTS, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 M265X		9200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3800 (70%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.