GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M390X, which has clock speeds of 723 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450		106 Watts
Radeon R9 M390X		125 Watts
	Difference: 19 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 M390X will be 177% faster than the GeForce GTS 450 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 102272 (177%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X is a lot (approximately 269%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTS 450. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 67488 (269%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X should be quite a bit (more or less 85%) better at AA than the GeForce GTS 450, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10608 (85%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

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