AMD Radeon R7 260X vs MSI Radeon R7 360 (R7 360 2GD5)

The maximum pixel fillrate is defined as the number of ROPs, multiplied by graphics clock speed. The Radeon R7 260X has an upper hand here, as it operates at a bit higher rate, and both cards have identical number of Raster Operations Pipelines. Better pixel fill rate allows more pixels to be drawn on screen per second, which results in increased graphics card performance, unless there are bottlenecks somewhere else.

Another important factor, that influences overall graphics card performance, is texture fillrate. This parameter is proportional to the number of TMUs (Texture Mapping Units) and graphics clock speed. The AMD Radeon R7 260X has more TMUs and insignificantly higher graphics frequency, therefore it has higher texture fillrate. Better maximum texture fill rate means that the GPU can use more complex 3D effects and/or apply more textures to each texel, which improves visual appearance of games and generated images.

Single Precision performance is useful for estimating card's maximum speed in programs, that process primarily single-precision floating point data. The performance is expressed in GFLOPS, or Giga (billions of) Floating Point Operations Per Second. Generally, the more stream processors or CUDA cores the graphics card has, and the the faster they operate at, the higher Single Precision performance will be. The AMD Radeon R7 260X has a modest advantage here. Higher single-precision performance number means the GPU will perform better in general computing applications. Since stream processors or CUDA cores are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

Maximum Double Precision performance is similar to the Single Precision performance, except that it applies to double-precision (64-bit) floating point operations. Since games do not use double-precision arithmetics, this characteristic is irrelevant to games performance. The AMD Radeon R7 260X graphics unit is faster when processing 64-bit floating-point numbers.

To speed up processing, the GPUs store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the card to run at higher display resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. The bandwidth depends on memory type, speed, and width of memory interface. Specifically, higher memory bandwidth of the AMD Radeon R7 260X is due to higher memory clock.