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 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 480 4GB, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1120 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this specific card. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of 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 output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.