GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 vs Radeon R7 M260

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 M260, which has a GPU core clock speed of 715 MHz, and 2048 MB of DDR3 memory running at 1000 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is made up of 384 SPUs, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R7 M260 in general. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3		22400 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M260		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260 will be much (more or less 99%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		17160 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8520 (99%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260 will be quite a bit (approximately 32%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		5720 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1400 (32%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number 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 rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.