GeForce GTX 1060 vs Radeon RX 480 4GB

Intro

The GeForce GTX 1060 uses a 16 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 1506 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 2000 MHz on this specific card. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 48 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 480 4GB, which features a core clock frequency of 1120 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1750 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 14 nm design. It features 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.