GeForce GTX 580 3GB vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M385X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this specific card. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 580 3GB should perform a lot faster than the Radeon R9 M385X overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		192384 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96384 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X is much (more or less 25%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 580 3GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12192 (25%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 3GB is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19456 (111%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must 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 higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.