In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 are significantly better than the AMD Radeon 9800 Pro.

The 8600 GT has a 160 MHz higher core clock speed and 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon 9800 Pro. This results in the 8600 GT providing 5.6 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since the 8600 GT supports up to DirectX 10.0.

The 8600 GT has a 160 MHz higher core clock speed than the Radeon 9800 Pro and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the 8600 GT providing 1.3 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 8600 GT was released over three years more recently than the Radeon 9800 Pro, 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 Radeon 9800 Pro when running the latest games.

The 8600 GT has 384 MB more video memory than the Radeon 9800 Pro, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, the overall memory performance is about the same.

The Radeon 9800 Pro has 22.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the 8600 GT, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon 9800 Pro is slightly better than the 8600 GT.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 has 32 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon 9800 Pro has 8. However, the actual shader performance of the 8600 GT is 43 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon 9800 Pro is 2. The 8600 GT having 41 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the Radeon 9800 Pro performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The 8600 GT transistor size technology is 70 nm (nanometers) smaller than the Radeon 9800 Pro. This means that the 8600 GT is expected to run massively cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the Radeon 9800 Pro.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 requires 46 Watts to run and the Radeon 9800 Pro requires 47 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the 8600 GT and a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the Radeon 9800 Pro. The Radeon 9800 Pro requires 1 Watts more than the 8600 GT to run. The difference is not significant enough for the Radeon 9800 Pro to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the 8600 GT.