GeForce GTS 450 1GB vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 285, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 918 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1375 MHz on this card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450 1GB		106 Watts
Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
	Difference: 84 Watts (79%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 285 should be 205% faster than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 118272 (205%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 is much (about 310%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 77760 (310%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 285 is superior to the GeForce GTS 450 1GB, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16848 (134%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.