GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon RX 5600

Intro

The GeForce GTX 980 makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 1126 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 5600, which uses a 7 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1375 MHz. The GDDR6 memory works at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.