GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R7 260X, which comes with clock speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1625 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 121 Watts (105%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 280 should in theory be quite a bit better than the Radeon R7 260X overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 37696 (36%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X should be quite a bit (approximately 28%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 280. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13440 (28%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 280 should be a little bit (approximately 9%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R7 260X, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1664 (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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 can be processed per second. This number is calculated 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.