GeForce GTX 460 vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M270X, which features GPU core speed of 725 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1125 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 640 Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 460 should be 20% quicker than the Radeon R9 M270X overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		86400 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 14400 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 is quite a bit (more or less 30%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M270X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		37800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8800 (30%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 should be a lot (approximately 40%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M270X, and also capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		16200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4600 (40%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.