GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280, which has a GPU core clock speed of 933 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, 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 590		6680 points
	Difference: 1281 (19%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 115 Watts (46%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 590 should theoretically be much faster than the Radeon R9 280 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 88320 (37%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be a lot (approximately 34%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 590. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26800 (34%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 will be a lot (approximately 95%) better at AA than the Radeon R9 280, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28416 (95%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.