GeForce GTX Titan Black vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280, which comes with core clock speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator 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 280		7961 points
	Difference: 3705 (47%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX Titan Black should be much faster than the Radeon R9 280 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan Black		336000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (40%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX Titan Black is quite a bit (approximately 104%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan Black		213360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 108864 (104%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX Titan Black is superior to the Radeon R9 280, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan Black		42672 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12816 (43%)

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 transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.