GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 280, which features a clock speed of 933 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation 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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 will be 849% quicker than the GeForce GT 320 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be a lot (approximately 706%) better at texture 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 running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is a better choice, by a large margin. (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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.