GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 260X, which comes with core clock speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1625 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 121 Watts (105%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 280 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R7 260X in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 37696 (36%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X should be much (more or less 28%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 280. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13440 (28%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 280 is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1664 (9%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock 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 maximum fill rate.