GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M385X, which features core speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 590 should in theory be much better than the Radeon R9 M385X in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 232320 (242%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 will be much (more or less 26%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M385X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16096 (26%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 should be a lot (approximately 231%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M385X, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 40672 (231%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

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