GeForce 8800 GTX vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 280X, which comes with core clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GTX		155 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 95 Watts (61%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280X should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 201600 (233%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X will be a lot (more or less 196%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 8800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		36800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72000 (196%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X is a lot (more or less 97%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 GTX, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		13800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13400 (97%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must 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 higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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 bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.