Nvidia Titan X vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 280, which comes with core clock speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

The Nvidia Titan X should theoretically perform a lot faster than the Radeon R9 280 in general. (explain)

Nvidia Titan X		491520 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 251520 (105%)

Texel Rate

The Nvidia Titan X will be quite a bit (about 204%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Nvidia Titan X		317408 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 212912 (204%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Nvidia Titan X is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Nvidia Titan X		136032 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 106176 (356%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its 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 - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.