GeForce GT 340 1GB 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 along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 340 1GB		69 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 181 Watts (262%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280, in theory, should be a lot faster than the GeForce GT 340 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 340 1GB		54400 MB/sec
	Difference: 185600 (341%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be quite a bit (about 494%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 340 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 340 1GB		17600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 86896 (494%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 340 1GB		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25456 (579%)

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 MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling 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 could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.