GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 280, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 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

GeForce GTX 980M		9476 points
Radeon R9 280		7961 points
	Difference: 1515 (19%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280		183 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 980M		155 Sol/s
	Difference: 28 (18%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 280 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 980M overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is just a bit (more or less 5%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 980M. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4848 (5%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M should be a lot (about 123%) better at FSAA than the Radeon R9 280, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 36576 (123%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out 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 DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated 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 video 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 can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.