GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon R9 M275X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M275X, which has a GPU core clock speed of 900 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1125 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 640 Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M275X		50 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 165 Watts (330%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 470, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the Radeon R9 M275X in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M275X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 61920 (86%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M275X is a small bit (more or less 6%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 470. (explain)

Radeon R9 M275X		36000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2008 (6%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 470 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M275X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9880 (69%)

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 MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.