GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M270X, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 725 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1125 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 640 Stream Processors, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 M270X should in theory be a lot superior to the GeForce 8600 GTS overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 40000 (125%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M270X is much (about 169%) better at AF than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18200 (169%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M270X is superior to the GeForce 8600 GTS, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6200 (115%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.