GeForce GTX 1050 vs Radeon RX Vega 56

Intro

The GeForce GTX 1050 makes use of a 14 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 1354 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1750 MHz on this particular model. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX Vega 56, which has a clock frequency of 1156 MHz and a HBM2 memory speed of 1600 MHz. It also makes use of a 2048-bit memory bus, and uses a 14 nm design. It features 3584 SPUs, 224 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface 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 memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel 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.