GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this model. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator 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

Radeon R9 280		7961 points
GeForce GTX 960		7627 points
	Difference: 334 (4%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280		183 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 960		154 Sol/s
	Difference: 29 (19%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280		22 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 960		11 Mh/s
	Difference: 11 (100%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 130 Watts (108%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280 should theoretically be much faster than the GeForce GTX 960 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 128000 (114%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is much (more or less 45%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 960. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32368 (45%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6208 (21%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. 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 memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.