GeForce GTX Titan Black vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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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 Titan Black		11666 points
Radeon R9 280X		8886 points
	Difference: 2780 (31%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX Titan Black, in theory, should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon R9 280X in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan Black		336000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
	Difference: 48000 (17%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX Titan Black is much (more or less 96%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 280X. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan Black		213360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 104560 (96%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX Titan Black is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan Black		42672 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15472 (57%)

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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.