GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 vs Radeon RX 470

Intro

The GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 makes use of a 80 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 540 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM works at a frequency of 700 MHz on this particular model. It features 32 SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 470, which has core speeds of 926 MHz on the GPU, and 1650 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.