GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 vs Radeon R9 390 8G

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 390 8G, which features core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3		47 Watts
Radeon R9 390 8G		275 Watts
	Difference: 228 Watts (485%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 390 8G should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		384000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3		22400 MB/sec
	Difference: 361600 (1614%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390 8G is a lot (about 1752%) better at AF than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		160000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 151360 (1752%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 390 8G is a lot (approximately 1381%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3, and able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		64000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 59680 (1381%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.