GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 vs Radeon RX 7900 XT

Intro

The GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 uses a 80 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 540 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 700 MHz on this specific model. It features 32 SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon RX 7900 XT, which comes with core speeds of 1500 MHz on the GPU, and 2500 MHz on the 20480 MB of GDDR6 RAM. It features 5376 SPUs as well as 336 Texture Address Units and 192 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant 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 max fill rate.