GeForce GTX 560 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280, which has GPU clock speed of 933 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 1792 Stream Processors, 112 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

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

Radeon R9 280		7961 points
GeForce GTX 560		3030 points
	Difference: 4931 (163%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 560		150 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 560 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560		128128 MB/sec
	Difference: 111872 (87%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be much (approximately 130%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 560. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560		45360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 59136 (130%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be a bit (about 15%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 560, and able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 560		25920 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3936 (15%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output 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 max fill rate.