GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M270X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1125 MHz on this particular model. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 580 should in theory be much better than the Radeon R9 M270X in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 120384 (167%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 is much (more or less 70%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M270X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20408 (70%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25456 (219%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.