GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon R7 M360

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 M360, which has GPU core speed of 1125 MHz, and 2048 MB of DDR3 memory set to run at 1000 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is made up of 384 Stream Processors, 24 TAUs, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 8600 GTS will be 100% quicker than the Radeon R7 M360 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M360		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M360 will be quite a bit (more or less 150%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon R7 M360		27000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16200 (150%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R7 M360 is superior to the GeForce 8600 GTS, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R7 M360		9000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3600 (67%)

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 past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.