GeForce GTX 275 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which features core speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. 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 GTX 275		219 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280 should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 275 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 275		127008 MB/sec
	Difference: 112992 (89%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be a lot (more or less 106%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 275. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		50640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 53856 (106%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		17724 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12132 (68%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.