Geforce GTX 670 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this specific card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 280X		8886 points
Geforce GTX 670		7351 points
	Difference: 1535 (21%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280X		21 Mh/s
Geforce GTX 670		13 Mh/s
	Difference: 8 (62%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Geforce GTX 670		170 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 80 Watts (47%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280X should perform quite a bit faster than the Geforce GTX 670 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Geforce GTX 670		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (50%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X will be just a bit (more or less 6%) more effective at texture filtering than the Geforce GTX 670. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Geforce GTX 670		102480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6320 (6%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 670 is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2080 (8%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.