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Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

The Geforce GTX 680 features clock speeds of 1006 MHz on the GPU, and 1502 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 270, which has a clock frequency of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1400 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Geforce GTX 680		7650 points
Radeon R9 270		5943 points
	Difference: 1707 (29%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Geforce GTX 680		16 Mh/s
Radeon R9 270		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 1 (7%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
Geforce GTX 680		195 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (30%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Geforce GTX 680 is 7% quicker than the Radeon R9 270 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		192256 MB/sec
Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
	Difference: 13056 (7%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 should be much (approximately 79%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 270. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		128768 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 56768 (79%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 680 is superior to the Radeon R9 270, but only just. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		32192 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3392 (12%)

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

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Geforce GTX 680

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Radeon R9 270

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model	Geforce GTX 680	Radeon R9 270
Manufacturer	nVidia	AMD
Year	March 2012	November 2013
Code Name	GK104	Curacao Pro
Memory	2048 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	1006 MHz	900 MHz
Memory Speed	6008 MHz	5600 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	195 watts	150 watts
Bandwidth	192256 MB/sec	179200 MB/sec
Texel Rate	128768 Mtexels/sec	72000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	32192 Mpixels/sec	28800 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	1536	1280
Texture Mapping Units	128	80
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
Fab Process	28 nm	28 nm
Transistors	3540 million	2800 million
Bus	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version	DirectX 11.0	DirectX 11.2
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.2	OpenGL 4.3

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock 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 rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.

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