GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R5 M230, which comes with a core clock frequency of 780 MHz and a DDR3 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 64-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 320 SPUs, 20 Texture Address Units, and 4 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R5 M230 should theoretically be much better than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 overall. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R5 M230 should be a lot (approximately 81%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6960 (81%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 is superior to the Radeon R5 M230, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1200 (38%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.