GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon R7 M265

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 M265, which features a GPU core clock speed of 725 MHz, and 2048 MB of DDR3 memory running at 1000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 384 SPUs, 24 TAUs, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same memory bandwidth, so theoretically they should have the same performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M265 is quite a bit (about 61%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon R7 M265		17400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6600 (61%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R7 M265 is the winner, but only just. (explain)

Radeon R7 M265		5800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 400 (7%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can 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 Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.