GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon R9 M275X

Intro

The GeForce GTS 450 makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 783 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 902 MHz on this specific model. It features 192 SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M275X, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 900 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1125 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 640 SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR 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 is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.