GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280X, which features 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

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		171 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 79 Watts (46%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280X should theoretically be much faster than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 176112 (157%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X will be quite a bit (approximately 162%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		41472 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 67328 (162%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be quite a bit (approximately 69%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11072 (69%)

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 over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.