GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon R5 M255

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R5 M255, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 940 MHz. The DDR3 RAM runs at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 320 SPUs along with 20 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 8600 GTS will be 100% faster than the Radeon R5 M255 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M255		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R5 M255 will be much (approximately 74%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon R5 M255		18800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (74%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R5 M255 will be a lot (approximately 39%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce 8600 GTS, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R5 M255		7520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2120 (39%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.