GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 285, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 918 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this card. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon R9 285		8500 points
GeForce GTX 590		6680 points
	Difference: 1820 (27%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (92%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 590 should in theory be a lot superior to the Radeon R9 285 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 152320 (87%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 is much (about 32%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 590. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25120 (32%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 will be quite a bit (about 98%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 285, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28896 (98%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's 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 per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.