GeForce GTX 460 vs Radeon R9 M275X

Intro

The GeForce GTX 460 comes with core speeds of 675 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 768 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 336 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 24 ROPs.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M275X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1125 MHz on this particular card. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number 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 also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.