GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M270X, which has core speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 590 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R9 M270X overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 256320 (356%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 will be a lot (more or less 168%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M270X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48696 (168%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 should be a lot (about 402%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon R9 M270X, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 46672 (402%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.