GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 870M		110 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (47%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 870M should theoretically perform just a bit faster than the Radeon R9 M280X in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 8000 (9%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M will be a lot (about 109%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M280X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 54992 (109%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M should be quite a bit (about 57%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M280X, and should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8184 (57%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is worked out 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.