In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 8370D.

The Radeon HD 8370D has a 220 MHz higher core clock speed and 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the 8600 GT. This results in the Radeon HD 8370D providing 9.6 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 Radeon HD 8370D has a 220 MHz higher core clock speed than the 8600 GT and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the Radeon HD 8370D providing 1.8 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 Radeon HD 8370D was released over three years more recently than the 8600 GT, and so the Radeon HD 8370D 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 8600 GT has 512 MB video memory, but the Radeon HD 8370D does not have an entry, so the two GPUs cannot be reliably compared in this area.

The Radeon HD 8370D has 128 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 has 32. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 8370D is 54 and the actual shader performance of the 8600 GT is 43. The Radeon HD 8370D having 11 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the Radeon HD 8370D delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the 8600 GT.

The Radeon HD 8370D transistor size technology is 40 nm (nanometers) smaller than the 8600 GT. This means that the Radeon HD 8370D is expected to run much cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the 8600 GT.

The Radeon HD 8370D requires 65 Watts to run and the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 requires 46 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the Radeon HD 8370D and a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the 8600 GT. The Radeon HD 8370D requires 19 Watts more than the 8600 GT to run. The difference is not significant enough for the Radeon HD 8370D to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the 8600 GT.