GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also features a 512-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2560 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 290 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be much (about 1381%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 119360 (1381%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		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

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.