GeForce GTS 450 1GB vs Radeon R7 M360

Intro

The GeForce GTS 450 1GB makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 783 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 902 MHz on this particular model. It features 192 SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 M360, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1125 MHz. The DDR3 RAM runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific model. It features 384 SPUs as well as 24 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.