GeForce GTX 950 vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M390X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 723 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950		90 Watts
Radeon R9 M390X		125 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (39%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 M390X is 51% quicker than the GeForce GTX 950 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950		105728 MB/sec
	Difference: 54272 (51%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X should be quite a bit (approximately 88%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 950. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 950		49152 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 43392 (88%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 950 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950		32768 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9632 (42%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.