GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7990, which has core clock speeds of 950 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		47 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 328 Watts (698%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7990 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 563200 (4400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 should be much (about 2715%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 234560 (2715%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is superior to the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 56480 (1307%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to its 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 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.