GeForce GT 1030 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280, which features 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 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 1030		30 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 220 Watts (733%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280 should be 388% quicker than the GeForce GT 1030 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 1030		49152 MB/sec
	Difference: 190848 (388%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be much (about 158%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GT 1030. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 1030		40480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 64016 (158%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be quite a bit (approximately 48%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GT 1030, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 1030		20240 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9616 (48%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past 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 type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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 of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.