GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M390X, which comes with clock speeds of 723 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M390X		125 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 480 is 11% faster than the Radeon R9 M390X overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 17408 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X should be quite a bit (approximately 120%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50544 (120%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 should be quite a bit (approximately 45%) better at FSAA than the Radeon R9 M390X, and able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10464 (45%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.