GeForce GTX 1050 3GB vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which features core clock speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1050 3GB		75 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (233%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 1050 3GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 1050 3GB		86016 MB/sec
	Difference: 153984 (179%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be quite a bit (about 56%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 1050 3GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 1050 3GB		66816 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37680 (56%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 1050 3GB is a better choice, but not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1050 3GB		33408 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3552 (12%)

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

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.