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GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 features core clock speeds of 540 MHz on the GPU, and 400 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR2 RAM. It features 32 SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 290X, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1250 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also features 2816 Stream Processors, 176 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 47 Watts
Radeon R9 290X 300 Watts
Difference: 253 Watts (538%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290X should in theory be much faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X 320000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 12800 MB/sec
Difference: 307200 (2400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X should be much (more or less 1530%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X 140800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 8640 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 132160 (1530%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290X is superior to the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X 51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 4320 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 46880 (1085%)

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

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GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon R9 290X

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 Radeon R9 290X
Manufacturer nVidia AMD
Year April 2007 October 2013
Code Name G84 Hawaii XT
Memory 512 MB 4096 MB
Core Speed 540 MHz 800 MHz
Memory Speed 800 MHz 5000 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 47 watts 300 watts
Bandwidth 12800 MB/sec 320000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 8640 Mtexels/sec 140800 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 4320 Mpixels/sec 51200 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 32 2816
Texture Mapping Units 16 176
Render Output Units 8 64
Bus Type DDR2 GDDR5
Bus Width 128-bit 512-bit
Fab Process 80 nm 28 nm
Transistors 289 million 6200 million
Bus PCIe x16 PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 10 DirectX 11.2
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.0 OpenGL 4.3

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.

Display Prices

Hide Prices

GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon R9 290X

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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