GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon R9 M375

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M375, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1015 MHz. The DDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1100 MHz on this card. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M375 should perform a bit faster than the GeForce 8600 GTS overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M375		35200 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (10%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M375 should be much (approximately 276%) better at AF than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon R9 M375		40600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29800 (276%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M375 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 M375		16240 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10840 (201%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated 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 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 could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.