GeForce GTX 960M vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which features a core clock speed of 933 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 TAUs, 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 960M		4350 points
	Difference: 3611 (83%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960M		65 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 185 Watts (285%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 280 should in theory be a lot superior to the GeForce GTX 960M overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 176000 (275%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be a lot (about 138%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 960M. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 60656 (138%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12320 (70%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, 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 worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling 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 the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.