GeForce GTX 1060 vs Radeon RX 480 4GB

Intro

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

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 480 4GB, which has a core clock frequency of 1120 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 14 nm design. It is comprised of 2304 SPUs, 144 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of 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 rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.