GeForce GTX 260 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 is set to run at a speed of 1500 MHz on this particular model. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 260 should theoretically be a bit superior to the Radeon R9 M385X overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 260		111888 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 15888 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X is a lot (more or less 67%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24736 (67%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M385X is the winner, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1472 (9%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.