GeForce GTX 880M vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M390X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 723 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular model. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M390X		125 Watts
GeForce GTX 880M		130 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M390X should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 880M in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 880M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 880M will be a lot (approximately 32%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M390X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		122112 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29568 (32%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 880M is superior to the Radeon R9 M390X, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		30528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7392 (32%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over 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 type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.