GeForce GTX 1060 vs Radeon R9 390 8G

Intro

The GeForce GTX 1060 makes use of a 16 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 1506 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 2000 MHz on this specific model. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 48 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 390 8G, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this specific card. It features 2560 SPUs as well as 160 TAUs and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high 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 texture units of the card 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.