GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 79 Watts (46%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280X is 178% quicker than the GeForce 8800 Ultra overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 184320 (178%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be quite a bit (approximately 178%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 69632 (178%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be a lot (approximately 85%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce 8800 Ultra, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12512 (85%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.