GeForce GTX 260 vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M385X, which has a GPU core clock speed of 1100 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1500 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 896 Stream Processors, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 260 should in theory be a bit better than the Radeon R9 M385X in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 260		111888 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 15888 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X will be a lot (approximately 67%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24736 (67%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M385X is a better choice, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1472 (9%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is 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 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.