GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M385X, which comes with GPU clock speed of 1100 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1500 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 M385X should theoretically be much better than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3		22400 MB/sec
	Difference: 73600 (329%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X will be quite a bit (about 613%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52960 (613%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M385X is superior to the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13280 (307%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.