GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

The GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER makes use of a 12 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 1650 MHz. The GDDR6 memory works at a speed of 1937 MHz on this particular card. It features 3072 SPUs as well as 192 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon RX 590, which makes use of a 12 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1469 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 2000 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 in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.