In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 are significantly better than the AMD Radeon R5 230.

The Radeon R5 230 has a 85 MHz higher core clock speed than the 8600 GT, but the 8600 GT has 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon R5 230. As a result, the 8600 GT exhibits a 3.6 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the Radeon R5 230. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The Radeon R5 230 has a 85 MHz higher core clock speed than the 8600 GT, but the 8600 GT has 4 more Render Output Units than the Radeon R5 230. As a result, the 8600 GT exhibits a 1.8 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the Radeon R5 230. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The Radeon R5 230 was released over three years more recently than the 8600 GT, and so the Radeon R5 230 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the 8600 GT when running the latest games.

The Radeon R5 230 has 512 MB more video memory than the 8600 GT, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, overall, the 8600 GT has superior memory performance.

The 8600 GT has 13.9 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon R5 230, which means that the memory performance of the 8600 GT is slightly better than the Radeon R5 230.

The Radeon R5 230 has 160 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 has 32. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon R5 230 is 50 and the actual shader performance of the 8600 GT is 43. The Radeon R5 230 having 7 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the 8600 GT performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The Radeon R5 230 transistor size technology is 40 nm (nanometers) smaller than the 8600 GT. This means that the Radeon R5 230 is expected to run much cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the 8600 GT.

The Radeon R5 230 requires 19 Watts to run and the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 requires 46 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the Radeon R5 230 and a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the 8600 GT. The 8600 GT requires 27 Watts more than the Radeon R5 230 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the 8600 GT to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the Radeon R5 230.