GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon R7 240

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 240, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 730 MHz. The DDR3 memory works at a speed of 900 MHz on this specific card. It features 320 SPUs as well as 20 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 240		30 Watts
GeForce 8600 GTS		75 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 8600 GTS should theoretically perform a bit faster than the Radeon R7 240 in general. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 240		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 240 is a lot (more or less 35%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		14600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3800 (35%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R7 240 is a better choice, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		5840 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 440 (8%)

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 moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once 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 AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.