GeForce GTX 580 3GB vs Radeon R9 380 2G

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 380 2G, which features core clock speeds of 970 MHz on the GPU, and 1425 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 380 2G		190 Watts
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		244 Watts
	Difference: 54 Watts (28%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 580 3GB should in theory be a bit superior to the Radeon R9 380 2G in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		192384 MB/sec
Radeon R9 380 2G		182400 MB/sec
	Difference: 9984 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 2G is quite a bit (about 120%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 580 3GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		108640 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 59232 (120%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 3GB is a better choice, though only just barely. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 380 2G		31040 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6016 (19%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen 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 better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.