GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which has GPU clock speed of 900 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1375 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 896 Stream Processors, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		47 Watts
Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
	Difference: 28 Watts (60%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M280X should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 75200 (588%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X is quite a bit (approximately 483%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 41760 (483%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M280X is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10080 (233%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.