GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 vs Radeon R7 360

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 360, which comes with GPU clock speed of 1050 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1625 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 768 Stream Processors, 48 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		47 Watts
Radeon R7 360		100 Watts
	Difference: 53 Watts (113%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R7 360 should in theory be much superior to the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 overall. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		104000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 91200 (713%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 360 should be a lot (more or less 483%) better at AF than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 41760 (483%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 360 will be much (more or less 289%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2, and able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		16800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12480 (289%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.