GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M270X, which comes with clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 280 should in theory be quite a bit better than the Radeon R9 M270X in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 280 is much (approximately 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

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 280 is superior to the Radeon R9 M270X, by far. (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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.