GeForce GTX 260 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280X, which has a clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 260		182 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 68 Watts (37%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280X is 157% faster than the GeForce GTX 260 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be much (more or less 195%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 71936 (195%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X is much (about 69%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 260, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock 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 rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.