GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280X, which comes with core clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 39 Watts (16%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 280X should in theory be much superior to the GeForce GTX 295 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
	Difference: 64224 (29%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X is a small bit (more or less 18%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 295. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16640 (18%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 is a little bit (more or less 19%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 280X, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5056 (19%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.