GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which has clock speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 470		2937 points
	Difference: 5024 (171%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (16%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 470 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
	Difference: 106080 (79%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is a lot (more or less 207%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 470. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 70504 (207%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5576 (23%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units 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 most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.