GeForce GTX 285 1GB vs Radeon R9 380 2G

Intro

The GeForce GTX 285 1GB uses a 55 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 648 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1242 MHz on this particular model. It features 240 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator 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 memory runs at a speed of 1425 MHz on this specific card. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at 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 could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.