GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon R9 M295X Mac Edition

Place in the ranking	383	1251
Place by popularity	not in top-100	not in top-100
Cost-effectiveness evaluation	no data	0.01
Power efficiency	3.67	0.47
Architecture	GCN 3.0 (2014−2019)	Tesla (2006−2010)
GPU code name	Amethyst	G84
Market segment	Laptop	Desktop
Release date	23 November 2014 (10 years ago)	17 April 2007 (17 years ago)
Launch price (MSRP)	no data	$199

Cost-effectiveness evaluation

Performance to price ratio. The higher, the better.

no data

Detailed specifications

General parameters such as number of shaders, GPU core base clock and boost clock speeds, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed. Note that power consumption of some graphics cards can well exceed their nominal TDP, especially when overclocked.

Pipelines / CUDA cores	2048	32
Core clock speed	850 MHz	675 MHz
Number of transistors	5,000 million	289 million
Manufacturing process technology	28 nm	80 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	250 Watt	60 Watt
Texture fill rate	108.8	10.80
Floating-point processing power	3.482 TFLOPS	0.0928 TFLOPS
ROPs	32	8
TMUs	128	16

Form factor & compatibility

Information on compatibility with other computer components. Useful when choosing a future computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. For desktop graphics cards it's interface and bus (motherboard compatibility), additional power connectors (power supply compatibility).

Interface	MXM-B (3.0)	PCIe 1.0 x16
Length	no data	198 mm
Width	no data	1-slot
Supplementary power connectors	no data	1x 6-pin
SLI options	-	+

VRAM capacity and type

Parameters of VRAM installed: its type, size, bus, clock and resulting bandwidth. Integrated GPUs have no dedicated video RAM and use a shared part of system RAM.

Memory type	GDDR5	GDDR3
Maximum RAM amount	4 GB	256 MB
Standard memory config per GPU	no data	256 MB
Memory bus width	256 Bit	128 Bit
Memory clock speed	1362 MHz	1000 MHz
Memory bandwidth	174.3 GB/s	32 GB/s

Connectivity and outputs

Types and number of video connectors present on the reviewed GPUs. As a rule, data in this section is precise only for desktop reference ones (so-called Founders Edition for NVIDIA chips). OEM manufacturers may change the number and type of output ports, while for notebook cards availability of certain video outputs ports depends on the laptop model rather than on the card itself.

Display Connectors

No outputs

2x DVI, 1x S-Video

API compatibility

List of supported 3D and general-purpose computing APIs, including their specific versions.

DirectX	12 (12_0)	11.1 (10_0)
Shader Model	6.3	4.0
OpenGL	4.6	2.1
OpenCL	2.0	1.1
Vulkan	1.2.131	N/A
CUDA	-	1.1

Gaming performance

Let's see how good the compared graphics cards are for gaming. Particular gaming benchmark results are measured in FPS.

Pros & cons summary

Performance score	13.40	0.41
Recency	23 November 2014	17 April 2007
Maximum RAM amount	4 GB	256 MB
Chip lithography	28 nm	80 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	250 Watt	60 Watt

R9 M295X Mac Edition has a 3168.3% higher aggregate performance score, an age advantage of 7 years, a 1500% higher maximum VRAM amount, and a 185.7% more advanced lithography process.

8600 GTS, on the other hand, has 316.7% lower power consumption.

The Radeon R9 M295X Mac Edition is our recommended choice as it beats the GeForce 8600 GTS in performance tests.

Be aware that Radeon R9 M295X Mac Edition is a notebook card while GeForce 8600 GTS is a desktop one.

Should you still have questions concerning choice between the reviewed GPUs, ask them in Comments section, and we shall answer.