GeForce GTX 1060 vs Radeon RX 480 4GB

Intro

The GeForce GTX 1060 features a core clock frequency of 1506 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 2000 MHz. It also makes use of a 192-bit bus, and uses a 16 nm design. It is made up of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 48 ROPs.

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

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it 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 AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

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