GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) vs Radeon R7 M260

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 M260, which has core clock speeds of 715 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 384 SPUs as well as 24 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R7 M260, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) overall. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		16000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260 should be a lot (about 99%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM). (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		17160 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8520 (99%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260 is a lot (approximately 32%) better at AA than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM), and should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		5720 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1400 (32%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once 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, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.