GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 280, which has GPU core speed of 933 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 280 should theoretically be quite a bit better 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 (about 45%) faster with regards to texture 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 high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960 is the winner, 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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

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