GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon R9 M395X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M395X, which comes with a core clock speed of 723 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M395X		125 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 480 should be a small bit faster than the Radeon R9 M395X in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M395X		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 17408 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M395X should be a lot (about 120%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		92544 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50544 (120%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 480 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M395X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10464 (45%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.