With each passing day, the gaming industry keeps on getting more and more extensive. Be it the latest high-end mega graphics games or the state of the art consoles of today introduced by the giants of the industry, every single technological advancement that is being discovered is somehow incorporated into games. And what makes the gaming industry all the more flourishing are the latest high-end graphics chipsets specifically made for gaming by the leading graphics card makers, AMD and NVIDIA. And with both the companies rolling out their all new chipsets into the market, comparing specifications of these two cards will most probably be the first in the list of questions for the hardcore gamer.
Here we bring to you an insight on how AMD’s latest Radeon RX 490 compares against NVIDIA’s latest offering, the GTX 1080.
AMD Radeon Rx 490 vs NVIDIA GTX 1080 : Specification Comparison
Overview
Radeon RX 490 8GB is an upcoming high-end performance Graphics Card based on the Third Revision of the Graphics Core Next (GCN) Architecture. Rumour has it that this upcoming chipset will be under the new Vega 10 GPU architecture from AMD. This new design is based on the 14nm process and is centred more on parallelism for better overall performance.
GeForce GTX 1080 is a High-End Graphics Card based on the Pascal Architecture which equips a GPU Codenamed P104-400-A1 which is a First Gen Pascal GPU and has 20 SM activated, offering 2560 Shader Processing Units, 160 TMUs and 64 ROPs. When it comes to Stream processing count, the GTX 1080 provides as much as 2569 streams while the AMD Radeon RX 490 is double that with 4096.
Power Consumption
The Radeon RX 490 requires 225 Watts to run, in contrast to GeForce GTX 1080Ti that requires 180 Watts. For Radeon RX 490 it is recommended to have a 550 watt PSU and for GTX 1080Ti it is recommended to have a 500 watt PSU.
Processing Power
With high core processor count and increased memory bandwidth, the AMD Radeon RX 490 wins at 12 TERAFLOPs. That is a solid 25 percent increase from NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080’s 9 TFLOPS. FLOPS or Floating-point Operations Per Second is the measure of computing performance that uses floating point calculations. This measure is commonly used in scientific applications and graphics processing.
Memory
The RX 490 GPU accesses an 8GB frame buffer of Second Generation HBM, through an 8192-bit memory interface. The size of the frame buffer is adequate and the Memory Clock Operates at 500MHz. On the other hand, the GPU of the GTX 1080 accesses an 8GB frame buffer of Second Gen GDDR5X, through a 256-bit memory interface, while the Memory Clock Operates at 1251MHz.
The RX 490 has 703.7GB/sec greater memory than the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti which shows that the memory performances of the RX 490 are mostly better than the Ge Force GTX 1080Ti.
Performance
In terms of overall performances both the chipset prove to be ideal for the hardcore gamers and have been able to perform stellarly when tested with the latest system and games according to tests. The RX 490 will be capable of running 2016 released AAA games on High-Ultra graphics settings using a 1440p resolution. In some cases it will also be capable of running a number of modern games at 4K resolution with a reliable frame rate at High graphics settings.
NVIDIA’s latest offering, the GTX 1080 can be over 25% Faster than GeForce GTX 980 Ti at 4K. In Fact, even the Dual Radeon R9 295X2 is easily topped. At 1920 x 1080, the default rank for all GD Graphics Card, expect a performance boost ranging between 20% and 30%, over GeForce GTX 980 Ti. As of May 2016, GeForce GTX 1080 is the fastest single Graphics Card available.
System Compatibility
These latest high-end graphics chipsets are built for the high-end gaming systems rolled out for the best consoles and computers of today and promise the best in-class performance when paired up with the right system. Radeon RX 490 8GB is best suited for resolutions up to and including 2560×1440. The company recommends a High-End Processor and 16GB of RAM for Optimal Performance.
GeForce GTX 1080 is best suited for resolutions up to and including 2560×1600. NVIDIA also recommends a High-End Processor and 16GB of RAM for Optimal Performance of this latest chipset.
Price and Availability
No price has been announced yet for the RX 490, Science World Report states. The GTX 1080 retails at $699.99 for the founder’s edition, so the RX 490 is definitely pegged to sport a price tag closer to that itself. It is said that AMD Radeon RX 490 is arriving as soon as next month while the GTX 1080 Ti has an expected early 2017 launch.
