GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M390X, which comes with a clock speed of 723 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 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 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 480 will be 11% quicker than the Radeon R9 M390X overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X will be a lot (more or less 120%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 480 is a better choice, and very much so. (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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends 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 maximum fill rate.