GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1200 MHz on this particular card. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		47 Watts
Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
	Difference: 53 Watts (113%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 M290X is 1100% quicker than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 140800 (1100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be quite a bit (approximately 687%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 59360 (687%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22880 (530%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of 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 video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.