GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 vs Radeon RX 480 4GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 480 4GB, which comes with clock speeds of 1120 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		202 Watts
	Difference: 52 Watts (35%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 480 4GB, in theory, should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		229376 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 117488 (105%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 4GB will be a lot (about 289%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216. (explain)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		161280 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		41472 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 119808 (289%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 480 4GB is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		35840 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19712 (122%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.