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GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon R9 390X 8G

Intro

The GeForce GTX 590 makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 607 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 855 MHz on this specific card. It features 512 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 48 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 390X 8G, which comes with a core clock frequency of 1050 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 features 2816 SPUs, 176 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

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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 390X 8G		13555 points
GeForce GTX 590		6680 points
	Difference: 6875 (103%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 390X 8G should be 17% faster than the GeForce GTX 590 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G is quite a bit (about 138%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 590. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		184800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 107104 (138%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G will be a little bit (more or less 15%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 590, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		67200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8928 (15%)

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

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GeForce GTX 590

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Radeon R9 390X 8G

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model	GeForce GTX 590	Radeon R9 390X 8G
Manufacturer	nVidia	AMD
Year	March 2011	June 2015
Code Name	GF110	Grenada XT
Memory	1536 MB (x2)	8192 MB
Core Speed	607 MHz (x2)	1050 MHz
Memory Speed	3420 MHz (x2)	6000 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	365 watts	275 watts
Bandwidth	328320 MB/sec	384000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	77696 Mtexels/sec	184800 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	58272 Mpixels/sec	67200 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	512 (x2)	2816
Texture Mapping Units	64 (x2)	176
Render Output Units	48 (x2)	64
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	384-bit (x2)	512-bit
Fab Process	40 nm	28 nm
Transistors	3000 million	6200 million
Bus	PCIe 2.0 x16	PCIe 3.0 ×16
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 12.0
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.5

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If 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 are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.

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