GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280X, which has GPU clock speed of 850 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1500 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 2048 Stream Processors, 128 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 14 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280X should be 103% faster than the GeForce GTX 280 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
	Difference: 146304 (103%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X will be much (about 126%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 280. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 60640 (126%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280X is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7936 (41%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.