GeForce GTX 580 3GB vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 285, which has a core clock speed of 918 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		244 Watts
	Difference: 54 Watts (28%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 580 3GB should in theory perform a little bit faster than the Radeon R9 285 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		192384 MB/sec
Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16384 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 should be much (approximately 108%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 580 3GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 53408 (108%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 3GB is quite a bit (approximately 26%) better at AA than the Radeon R9 285, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7680 (26%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.