GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon R9 380 2G

Intro

The GeForce GTX 580 has a GPU clock speed of 772 MHz, and the 1536 MB of GDDR5 RAM is set to run at 1002 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 512 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 48 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 380 2G, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 970 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1425 MHz on this particular card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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