GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 590, which uses a 12 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1469 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 2000 MHz on this model. It features 2304 SPUs as well as 144 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 590 should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 480 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
	Difference: 84736 (48%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 is a lot (approximately 404%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 169536 (404%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 is a lot (more or less 40%) better at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 480, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13408 (40%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.