In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon X1950 XT are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3.

The 8600 GT was released less than a year after the Radeon X1950 XT, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The Radeon X1950 XT and the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The Radeon X1950 XT has 35.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the 8600 GT, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon X1950 XT is noticeably better than the 8600 GT.

The Radeon X1950 XT has 48 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 has 32. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon X1950 XT is 20 and the actual shader performance of the 8600 GT is 43. The 8600 GT having 23 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the Radeon X1950 XT performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The Radeon X1950 XT requires 96 Watts to run and the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 requires 46 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the 8600 GT, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the Radeon X1950 XT. The Radeon X1950 XT requires 50 Watts more than the 8600 GT to run. The difference is significant enough that the Radeon X1950 XT may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the 8600 GT.