GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M380, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this particular model. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 M380 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (36%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 1GB should be just a bit (approximately 18%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M380. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7232 (18%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 will be much (more or less 36%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4192 (36%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.