GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm vs Radeon R9 390X 8G

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 390X 8G, which comes with core speeds of 1050 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2816 SPUs as well as 176 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		171 Watts
Radeon R9 390X 8G		275 Watts
	Difference: 104 Watts (61%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 390X 8G should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		384000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 272112 (243%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G should be a lot (about 346%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		184800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		41472 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 143328 (346%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 390X 8G is superior to the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		67200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 51072 (317%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.