GeForce GTX 260 vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M385X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1500 MHz on this particular model. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 260 should be just a bit faster than the Radeon R9 M385X in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 260		111888 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 15888 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X should be much (about 67%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24736 (67%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X should be a small bit (more or less 9%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 260, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1472 (9%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.