GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 285, which comes with GPU clock speed of 918 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon R9 285		8500 points
GeForce GTX 590		6680 points
	Difference: 1820 (27%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (92%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 590 should be 87% faster than the Radeon R9 285 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 152320 (87%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 is quite a bit (approximately 32%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 590. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25120 (32%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 should be quite a bit (about 98%) better at FSAA than the Radeon R9 285, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28896 (98%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

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