GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M385X, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 1100 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1500 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 896 Stream Processors, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M385X should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce 8600 GTS overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (200%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X is much (about 470%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50800 (470%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X will be much (about 226%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8600 GTS, and should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12200 (226%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result 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, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are 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 graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.