GeForce GTX 1060 vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M390X, which features a clock speed of 723 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1060		120 Watts
Radeon R9 M390X		125 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 1060 will be 23% quicker than the Radeon R9 M390X overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		196608 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 36608 (23%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1060 will be quite a bit (about 30%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 M390X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		120480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27936 (30%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 1060 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		72288 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 49152 (212%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of 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.