GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280X, which has core clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX 970		10867 points
Radeon R9 280X		8886 points
	Difference: 1981 (22%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280X		294 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 970		262 Sol/s
	Difference: 32 (12%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280X		21 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 970		19 Mh/s
	Difference: 2 (11%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 105 Watts (72%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 280X should theoretically be much superior to the GeForce GTX 970 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (29%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 will be a small bit (more or less 0%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 280X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 400 (0%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970 is superior to the Radeon R9 280X, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 40000 (147%)

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 moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.