GeForce GTX 950M vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which features a clock speed of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950M		55 Watts
Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (36%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 M280X should theoretically be a lot superior to the GeForce GTX 950M in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 56000 (175%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X will be much (approximately 38%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 950M. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		36560 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13840 (38%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 950M will be just a bit (more or less 2%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M280X, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950M		14624 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 224 (2%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling 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 record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.