GeForce GTX 460 SE vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280, which features clock speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		150 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 280 should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 460 SE overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 131200 (121%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be quite a bit (about 235%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 SE. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 73296 (235%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is a lot (approximately 44%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 460 SE, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		20800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9056 (44%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling 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 that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.