GeForce 8500 GT vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M380, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1500 MHz on this model. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 M380 should in theory be quite a bit better than the GeForce 8500 GT in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 83200 (650%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 is a lot (about 1011%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36400 (1011%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 should be much (more or less 789%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce 8500 GT, and also capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14200 (789%)

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 MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.