GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which comes with GPU 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 comprised 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 580		4956 points
	Difference: 3005 (61%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280 is 25% quicker than the GeForce GTX 580 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
	Difference: 47616 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is a lot (more or less 111%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 55088 (111%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (24%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.