GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which has a core clock speed of 933 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 1792 SPUs, 112 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3		47 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 203 Watts (432%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 280 should theoretically be much superior to the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3		22400 MB/sec
	Difference: 217600 (971%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be much (more or less 1109%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 95856 (1109%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be much (about 591%) better at FSAA than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3		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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

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