Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

The Geforce GTX 680 features clock speeds of 1006 MHz on the GPU, and 1502 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon R9 280X, which comes with a core clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.