GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon R5 M330

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R5 M330, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1030 MHz. The DDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 320 SPUs along with 20 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 8600 GTS should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon R5 M330 overall. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M330		14400 MB/sec
	Difference: 17600 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R5 M330 will be much (more or less 91%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon R5 M330		20600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9800 (91%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R5 M330 should be a lot (more or less 53%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8600 GTS, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R5 M330		8240 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2840 (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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses 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 faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.