GeForce 830M vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280X, which has core speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 830M		25 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 225 Watts (900%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280X should be 1900% quicker than the GeForce 830M overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
GeForce 830M		14400 MB/sec
	Difference: 273600 (1900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X will be quite a bit (about 561%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 830M. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 830M		16464 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 92336 (561%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280X is superior to the GeForce 830M, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 830M		8232 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18968 (230%)

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 moved 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 type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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 ability to get to the max fill rate.