GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which features a core clock frequency of 933 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 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

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, in theory, should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 960 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be much (more or less 45%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 960. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 is a lot (more or less 21%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 280, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.