GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon R7 M260

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 M260, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 715 MHz. The DDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific model. It features 384 SPUs as well as 24 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

GeForce GTX 480		3650 points
Radeon R7 M260		1120 points
	Difference: 2530 (226%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 480 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R7 M260 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M260		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 161408 (1009%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 should be much (more or less 145%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R7 M260. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260		17160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24840 (145%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 480 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260		5720 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 27880 (487%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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 can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.