GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon R9 380 4G

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 380 4G, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 970 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1425 MHz on this specific card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon R9 380 4G		8837 points
GeForce GTX 480		3650 points
	Difference: 5187 (142%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 380 4G		190 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 380 4G should perform a small bit faster than the GeForce GTX 480 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		182400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
	Difference: 4992 (3%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 4G is a lot (approximately 159%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		108640 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 66640 (159%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 is a small bit (more or less 8%) better at AA than the Radeon R9 380 4G, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 380 4G		31040 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2560 (8%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.