GeForce RTX 3080 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 590, which makes use of a 12 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1469 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 2000 MHz on this specific card. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
GeForce RTX 3080		320 Watts
	Difference: 145 Watts (83%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce RTX 3080 should theoretically be a lot superior to the Radeon RX 590 overall. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3080		778547 MB/sec
Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 516403 (197%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3080 should be a lot (approximately 85%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 590. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3080		391680 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 180144 (85%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce RTX 3080 is superior to the Radeon RX 590, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3080		138240 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 91232 (194%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs 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 rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.