GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280, which has GPU core speed of 933 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 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 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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 580 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be much (about 111%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 is a lot (about 24%) more effective at AA than the Radeon R9 280, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. 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 is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.