GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3 vs Radeon R7 M360

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R7 M360, which features a GPU core clock 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 SPUs, 24 TAUs, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R7 M360 overall. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3		22400 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M360		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M360 should be a lot (approximately 213%) better at AF than the GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3. (explain)

Radeon R7 M360		27000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18360 (213%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R7 M360 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R7 M360		9000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4680 (108%)

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 calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also 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, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.