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Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

The Geforce GTX 680 makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 1006 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1502 MHz on this particular model. It features 1536 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon R9 270, which features GPU clock speed of 900 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1400 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1280 Stream Processors, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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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

In theory, the Geforce GTX 680 should be a little bit faster than the Radeon R9 270 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 is much (about 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 running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 680 is superior to the Radeon R9 270, though only just barely. (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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. 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 fill rate also depends 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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