GeForce GTX 460 vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M270X, which features a clock speed of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1125 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 460, in theory, should be a little bit faster than the Radeon R9 M270X overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		86400 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 14400 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 should be a lot (about 30%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M270X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		37800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8800 (30%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 will be much (approximately 40%) better at FSAA than the Radeon R9 M270X, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		16200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4600 (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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one 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 clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.