GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon R7 M260

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 M260, which features clock speeds of 715 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 280 should perform much faster than the Radeon R7 M260 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M260		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 125696 (786%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 280 should be a lot (about 181%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 M260. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260		17160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31000 (181%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 280 is quite a bit (about 237%) better at FSAA than the Radeon R7 M260, and able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260		5720 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13544 (237%)

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 moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.