GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2 vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 M260X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 825 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R7 M260X should in theory be much superior to the GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2 overall. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		64000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260X is quite a bit (about 129%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11160 (129%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R7 M260X is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		6600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2280 (53%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past 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 RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.