GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		150 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280X will be 165% quicker than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 179200 (165%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be quite a bit (more or less 199%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		36400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72400 (199%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280X is superior to the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM), and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		20800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (31%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant 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 max fill rate.