GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M390X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 723 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M390X		125 Watts
GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
	Difference: 119 Watts (95%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 580 should in theory be just a bit better than the Radeon R9 M390X overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32384 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X will be much (approximately 87%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 43136 (87%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 will be a lot (about 60%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M390X, and able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13920 (60%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

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