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

The 8600 GT was released over a year more recently than the Radeon X1950 Series, and so the 8600 GT is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the Radeon X1950 Series.

The 8600 GT has 256 MB more video memory than the Radeon X1950 Series, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, overall, the Radeon X1950 Series has superior memory performance.

The Radeon X1950 Series has 41.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the 8600 GT, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon X1950 Series is noticeably better than the 8600 GT.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 has 32 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon X1950 Series has 36. However, the actual shader performance of the 8600 GT is 43 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon X1950 Series is 12. The 8600 GT having 31 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the Radeon X1950 Series 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 X1950 Series. We would recommend a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the 8600 GT and a PSU with at least 420 Watts for the Radeon X1950 Series. The Radeon X1950 Series has been recommended a PSU with 70 Watts more than the 8600 GT. The difference is significant enough that the Radeon X1950 Series may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the 8600 GT.