GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 285, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 918 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1375 MHz on this specific card. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon R9 285		8500 points
GeForce GTX 480		3650 points
	Difference: 4850 (133%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 480 will be 1% faster than the Radeon R9 285 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 1408 (1%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 is a lot (about 145%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 60816 (145%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 480 is superior to the Radeon R9 285, though only just barely. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4224 (14%)

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 max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 are processed per second. This 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

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