GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) 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 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		135 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 115 Watts (85%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280X should in theory be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		62080 MB/sec
	Difference: 225920 (364%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be much (about 162%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G92). (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		41600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 67200 (162%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be much (about 162%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G92), and will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16800 (162%)

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 MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus 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 memory bandwidth, the better 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 in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.