GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M380, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1500 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M380 should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce 8600 GTS overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (200%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 is much (approximately 270%) better at AF than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29200 (270%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 will be a lot (more or less 196%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce 8600 GTS, and capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10600 (196%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out 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 graphics 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 chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.