GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which has clock speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		47 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 203 Watts (432%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 227200 (1775%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be quite a bit (more or less 1109%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 95856 (1109%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is superior to the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25536 (591%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.