GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280, which features 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 comprised of 1792 Stream Processors, 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 480		3650 points
	Difference: 4311 (118%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 280 should be much faster than the GeForce GTX 480 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
	Difference: 62592 (35%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be quite a bit (about 149%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 62496 (149%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 480 is superior to the Radeon R9 280, but only just. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3744 (13%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

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