GeForce GTX 580 3GB vs Radeon R9 380 2G

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 380 2G, which has a core clock speed of 970 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1425 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 380 2G		190 Watts
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		244 Watts
	Difference: 54 Watts (28%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 580 3GB should be a little bit faster than the Radeon R9 380 2G overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		192384 MB/sec
Radeon R9 380 2G		182400 MB/sec
	Difference: 9984 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 2G is much (about 120%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 580 3GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		108640 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 59232 (120%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 3GB is the winner, but not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 380 2G		31040 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6016 (19%)

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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.