GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon RX 580

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 580, which comes with a core clock speed of 1257 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 2000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 14 nm design. It is made up of 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 580		185 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 104 Watts (56%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon RX 580 should be a little bit faster than the GeForce GTX 295 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		262144 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
	Difference: 38368 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 580 will be a lot (more or less 96%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 295. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		181008 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 88848 (96%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 580 is much (about 25%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 295, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		40224 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7968 (25%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 the graphics card could 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 Render Output Units by the clock 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 also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.