GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M385X, which features core clock speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M385X will be 329% quicker than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3		22400 MB/sec
	Difference: 73600 (329%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X should be much (approximately 613%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52960 (613%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M385X is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB 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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.