GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which has GPU clock speed of 933 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 1792 Stream Processors, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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 980		13552 points
Radeon R9 280		7961 points
	Difference: 5591 (70%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280		22 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 980		20 Mh/s
	Difference: 2 (10%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 980		408 Sol/s
Radeon R9 280		183 Sol/s
	Difference: 225 (123%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 85 Watts (52%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 should perform a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 980 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (7%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 is a lot (about 38%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39632 (38%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 is superior to the Radeon R9 280, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 42208 (141%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends 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 get to the max fill rate.