GeForce GTX 580 3GB vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		244 Watts
	Difference: 54 Watts (28%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 580 3GB will be 9% quicker than the Radeon R9 285 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		192384 MB/sec
Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16384 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 should be quite a bit (about 108%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 580 3GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 53408 (108%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 3GB is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7680 (26%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.