GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon RX 480

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 480, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1120 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 2000 MHz on this card. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 RX 480		13349 points
GeForce GTX 960		7627 points
	Difference: 5722 (75%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 480		280 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 960		154 Sol/s
	Difference: 126 (82%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 480		27 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 960		11 Mh/s
	Difference: 16 (145%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
Radeon RX 480		150 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 480 should in theory be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 960 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		262144 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 150144 (134%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 is a lot (more or less 124%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 960. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		161280 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 89152 (124%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 is just a bit (more or less 1%) better at FSAA than the Radeon RX 480, and should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 480		35840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 224 (1%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels 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 number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.