GeForce GTX 1080 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 590, which comes with a clock speed of 1469 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 2000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 12 nm design. It is comprised of 2304 SPUs, 144 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
GeForce GTX 1080		180 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 1080 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon RX 590 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1080		327680 MB/sec
Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 65536 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1080 is a lot (about 22%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon RX 590. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1080		257120 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 45584 (22%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1080 will be a lot (more or less 119%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon RX 590, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1080		102848 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 55840 (119%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling 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 chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.