GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon R9 390 8G

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 390 8G, which comes with a clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 512-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2560 SPUs, 160 TAUs, and 64 ROPs.

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 390 8G		12733 points
GeForce GTX 590		6680 points
	Difference: 6053 (91%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 390 8G		275 Watts
GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 90 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 390 8G should in theory be a little bit faster than the GeForce GTX 590 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		384000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
	Difference: 55680 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390 8G will be quite a bit (approximately 106%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 590. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		160000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 82304 (106%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 390 8G is a better choice, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		64000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5728 (10%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core 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 most 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 calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.