GeForce GT 1030 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280X, which features a GPU core clock speed of 850 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1500 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280X should in theory perform a lot faster than the GeForce GT 1030 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 1030		49152 MB/sec
	Difference: 238848 (486%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X is quite a bit (about 169%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GT 1030. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 1030		40480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 68320 (169%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X is quite a bit (more or less 34%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GT 1030, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 1030		20240 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6960 (34%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number 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 also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.