GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M270X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1125 MHz on this particular model. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 280 is 97% quicker than the Radeon R9 M270X in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 69696 (97%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 280 will be quite a bit (more or less 66%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 M270X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19160 (66%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 280 should be quite a bit (about 66%) better at FSAA than the Radeon R9 M270X, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7664 (66%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.