GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280, which features a clock frequency of 933 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 TAUs, 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 550 Ti		1897 points
	Difference: 6064 (320%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 134 Watts (116%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 is 144% quicker than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 141504 (144%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be quite a bit (more or less 263%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 75696 (263%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8256 (38%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.