In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon X800 XT Platinum are marginally better than the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3.

The 8600 GT was released over three years more recently than the X800 XT, and so the 8600 GT is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the X800 XT when running the latest games.

The 8600 GT has 256 MB more video memory than the X800 XT, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, overall, the X800 XT has superior memory performance.

The X800 XT has 49.3 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the 8600 GT, which means that the memory performance of the X800 XT is noticeably better than the 8600 GT.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 has 32 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon X800 XT Platinum has 16. However, the actual shader performance of the 8600 GT is 43 and the actual shader performance of the X800 XT is 5. The 8600 GT having 38 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the X800 XT performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 requires 46 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon X800 XT Platinum. We would recommend a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the 8600 GT.