GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 590, which comes with GPU core speed of 1469 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 2000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 590 should be 17% quicker than the GeForce GTX 980 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 38144 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 is quite a bit (approximately 47%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 980. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 67408 (47%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 is superior to the Radeon RX 590, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25056 (53%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.