GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon R7 M360

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 M360, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1125 MHz. The DDR3 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 384 SPUs as well as 24 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 8600 GTS will be 100% faster than the Radeon R7 M360 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M360		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M360 will be much (more or less 150%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon R7 M360		27000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16200 (150%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 M360 will be much (about 67%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8600 GTS, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R7 M360		9000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3600 (67%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated 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 card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core 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 rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.