GeForce GTX 650 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280, which comes with a core clock frequency of 933 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also features a 384-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

Radeon R9 280		7961 points
GeForce GTX 650		2263 points
	Difference: 5698 (252%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 650		64 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 186 Watts (291%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280, in theory, should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 650 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 650		80000 MB/sec
	Difference: 160000 (200%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be quite a bit (about 209%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 650. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 650		33856 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 70640 (209%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is superior to the GeForce GTX 650, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 650		16928 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12928 (76%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's 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 applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling 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 the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.