In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 5570 XFX 1GB Edition are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3.

The HD 5570 has a 85 MHz higher core clock speed and 4 more Texture Mapping Units than the 8600 GT. This results in the HD 5570 providing 3.9 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 5570 has a 85 MHz higher core clock speed than the 8600 GT and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the HD 5570 providing 0.7 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The HD 5570 was released over a year more recently than the 8600 GT, and so the HD 5570 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the 8600 GT.

The HD 5570 has 512 MB more video memory than the 8600 GT, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the HD 5570 also has superior memory performance overall.

The HD 5570 has 3.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the 8600 GT, which means that the memory performance of the HD 5570 is marginally better than the 8600 GT.

The Radeon HD 5570 XFX 1GB Edition has 400 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 has 32. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 5570 is 163 and the actual shader performance of the 8600 GT is 43. The HD 5570 having 120 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 5570 delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the 8600 GT.

The HD 5570 transistor size technology is 40 nm (nanometers) smaller than the 8600 GT. This means that the HD 5570 is expected to run much cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the 8600 GT.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 requires 46 Watts to run but there is no entry for the HD 5570. We would recommend a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the HD 5570 and a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the 8600 GT. The HD 5570 has been recommended a PSU with 50 Watts more than the 8600 GT. The difference is significant enough that the HD 5570 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the 8600 GT.