GeForce GTX 275 vs GeForce GTX 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 280, which features a clock speed of 602 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 1107 MHz. It also uses a 512-bit memory bus, and uses a 65 nm design. It is made up of 240 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 275		219 Watts
GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 17 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 280, in theory, should perform a little bit faster than the GeForce GTX 275 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 275		127008 MB/sec
	Difference: 14688 (12%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 275 should be a little bit (more or less 5%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 280. (explain)

GeForce GTX 275		50640 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2480 (5%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 280 is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		17724 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1540 (9%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to 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 potential to get to the maximum fill rate.