GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon RX 580

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 580, which has GPU clock speed of 1257 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 2000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 2304 Stream Processors, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 580		185 Watts
GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 51 Watts (28%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 580 should in theory perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 280 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		262144 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
	Difference: 120448 (85%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 580 should be quite a bit (about 276%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 280. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		181008 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 132848 (276%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 580 is much (about 109%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 280, and capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		40224 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20960 (109%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

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