GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280, which features a core 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 is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 150		141 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 109 Watts (77%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTS 150 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 208000 (650%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is quite a bit (about 121%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTS 150. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 57136 (121%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be quite a bit (about 152%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 150, and also able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18016 (152%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 can be processed in one second. This figure 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 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 the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.