GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M385X, which has core clock speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 480 should perform much faster than the Radeon R9 M385X in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 81408 (85%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X will be a lot (approximately 47%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19600 (47%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 should be a lot (more or less 91%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M385X, and also able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16000 (91%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.