Radeon R7 M260X vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280, which comes with clock speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R7 M260X in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 176000 (275%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be much (approximately 428%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 M260X. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 84696 (428%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is superior to the Radeon R7 M260X, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23256 (352%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 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 potential to get to the max fill rate.