GeForce GTS 450 1GB vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 260X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1625 MHz on this specific card. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450 1GB		106 Watts
Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
	Difference: 9 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R7 260X, in theory, should perform much faster than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 46272 (80%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X will be a lot (about 146%) better at AF than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36544 (146%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X is much (approximately 40%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5072 (40%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.