GeForce GTX 580 3GB vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M385X, which features a clock speed of 1100 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 580 3GB will be 100% faster than the Radeon R9 M385X in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X should be quite a bit (more or less 25%) more effective at anisotropic 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 using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 3GB is superior to the Radeon R9 M385X, by a large margin. (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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.