GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this specific model. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 320		43 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 207 Watts (481%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 280 should in theory be much better than the GeForce GT 320 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 320		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 214720 (849%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be quite a bit (approximately 706%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 320. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 91536 (706%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is superior to the GeForce GT 320, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 320		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25536 (591%)

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 across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.